Xiaomi raises the bar for routers with internal storage
Articles – From the horse’s mouth
Seagate
A Wireless Router with 6TB Storage? | Digital Den comsumer blog
Xiaomi
Mi WiFi Router 2 With 6Tb
My Comments
Seagate has helped another manufacturer raise the bar for a consumer-grade router that has integrated storage.
Xiaomi had released to the Chinese market the Mi WiFi Router 2 with 6Tb storage on board. This is provided with a Seagate hard disk that is optimised for video-surveillance applications, with this hard disk able to handle continuous write operations and have a 1-million-hour mean-time-between-failure rate which leads to very high reliability. This is compared to most integrated-storage routers of this kind coming in with 1Tb hard disks typically optimised for regular computers.
The benefit that Seagate drew out was for storage integrated in an Internet-edge router is that the storage can serve as a waypoint for incoming and outgoing data especially if customers are using Internet services with not-so-good bandwidth. This is in addition to being an integrated network-attached storage for documents and media to be pulled up over the home network.
It could show that it is feasible to set up an integrated-storage router with today’s NAS-grade or surveillance-grade hard disks having capacities in the order of at least 4Tb. As well, using application-level gateways and other software can make these devices work as staging posts for such applications as cloud storage services, software updates, content delivery and the like.
As well, the higher-capacity higher-reliability hard disks are showing up as a trend that will affect how network storage is designed.