Asus unveils terabyte laptop

Asus will unveil a laptop that should satisfy the storage needs of all but the biggest of power users: the M70S comes with 1TB of storage space.

The machine, due for release at next week's Consumer Electronics Show, is targeted at the fast-expanding multimedia sector of the laptop market and packs dual 500GB drives from Hitachi, expected to be announced later Thursday. The drives can be organized in a RAID 0 configuration, where data is distributed between the two drives to provide a performance boost on a single drive, or as RAID 1, where data is mirrored on each drive to provide redundancy in case of drive failure. In the latter case the storage space visible to the user drops to 500GB.

The Asus M70 comes optionally equipped to make use of the extra storage space with a digital/analog TV tuner and video recording capability. An optional remote control is also available. The explosion in digital video is one of the main reasons why consumers are increasingly demanding as much storage space on their laptops as on desktop computers.

To watch all that video, the laptop comes with a 17-inch widescreen display at either WXGA+ (1,440 by 900 pixels) or WUXGA (1,920 by 1,200 pixels) resolution depending on the model. It should be noted that the former screen won't be able to show a high-definition image, which is 1,920 by 1,080 pixels, at full resolution.

An Intel Core2 Duo processor lies at the heart of the laptop and models will be available with the T7700, 7500, 7300, or 7100 versions of the chip. Other features include an ATI 3650 graphics card, web cam, fingerprint reader, and 1GB of memory.

Asus will also launch the M50S laptop at CES. The computer is targeted at the same multimedia segment of the market, but attempts to satisfy a niche for a high-performance laptop that's slightly smaller than the typical 17-inch models.

The M50S machine comes with the same processor selection but has a 15.4-inch widescreen display at either WXGA (1,366 by 768 pixels), WXGA+ or WSXGA+ (1,680 by 1,050 pixels) resolution.