Other World Computing Ships Monster 12TB Desktop Drive

If you're a video or animation editor who often works in high-definition projects -- and there are more and more of those happening these days --  having a lot of storage around to keep all those mammoth digital files handy is a huge advantage.

After all, a typical HD movie can soak up an average of 50GB to 100GB of space.  If you have a few hundred of those babies lying around, it's not easy to find places to put them. Of course, if one simply has a lot of files, period, something like 12TB will satisfy most storage needs for quite a while.

Other World Computing (aka OWC) now has an answer to personal or small business Big Data. It started shipping a new desktop RAID drive Feb. 23 that simply blows away competitors based on capacity alone.

The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 (pictured) is a monster 12TB enterprise RAID (redundant array of independent disks) storage drive, designed with a highly-reliable 2 million MTBF (mean time between failures) for critical business applications that must never go down.

Mean time between failures (MTBF) is the predicted elapsed time -- in this case, hours -- between inherent failures of a system during operation.

The QX2, which retails for $2,200, is comprised of four 3TB HDDs, all situated in hot-swappable drive bays, so replacing a bum disk is quite easy.

OWC, based in Woodstock, Ill., offers four interfaces for the QX2: FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0 and eSATA.

The mammoth storage machine also features selectable RAID settings of 0, 1, 5, 10; 300MB/s data transfer rates for high speed; plug/play storage and redundancy for either Macs and PCs. It's all covered by a 5-year warranty, OWC said.