Pro surfer Mike Parsons rode this monster wave at Cortes Bank in January. This image and thousands of others are stored on a 1-TB Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus solution. (Photography by Robert Brown)

Brown had hoped to use his 36-foot catamaran powerboat to transport a group of elite surfers out to the big swells of Cortes Bank, a chain of underwater mountains in the open ocean about 100 miles (170 kilometers) west of San Diego. On January 5, a powerful storm battered California—and created an ideal opportunity for big-wave surfing

“I had trouble starting my engines that morning,” recalls Brown, “and we only had a small window before the storm made the trip too dangerous to attempt.”

Fortunately, Brown got his engines working in time to document Grant “Twiggy” Baker, Brad Gerlach, Greg Long and Mike Parsons riding waves as big as 80 feet—the equivalent of a nine-story building—believed to be the largest anyone has ever attempted. Just one week later, Long won the Mavericks Surf Contest in Northern California, considered the “Super Bowl” of big-wave competitions, and Baker finished second.

Brown keeps those once-in-a-lifetime shots from Cortes Bank, and thousands of other digital images from his portfolio, secure on a 1-TB Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus external storage solution from Seagate.

“That day at Cortes Bank could go down as the biggest day in surfing history,” says Brown, 49, whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, National Geographic and many other publications. “They all rode the biggest waves of their lives. Those photos are timeless. If I lose any pictures from any job, I’m done. Reliability and performance are critical to my work; Seagate’s never let me down.”

Beefy Capacity
Brown enjoys the beefy capacity of the Maxtor OneTouch® 4 Plus solution, which has room for up 320,000 digital pictures (or 1,000 hours of digital video and 16,660 hours of digital music). He also likes the drive’s easy-to-use features (which include automated backup and encryption software for added security) and its sleek design.

“All I had to do was connect the drive’s FireWire cable to my iMac,” Brown says of the setup process. “Within minutes, I was loading pictures onto my computer. I never even read the directions that came with the drive. I also like its beautiful design. This drive just flows on my desk and looks great sitting next to my iMac.”

Brown also uses a compact 160-GB Seagate FreeAgent™ Go portable hard drive to securely transport his files while on assignment for a commercial client like Yamaha boats, Kawasaki jet skis, or Quicksilver surf wear. Brown will bring along his Apple PowerBook laptop for editing photos on the fly; he backs up and shares his work with clients using the FreeAgent Go solution.

“The data-transfer speeds, as with the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus drive, are incredible,” says Brown, who shoots with a 21-megapixel Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III digital camera. “I can load a full day’s worth of work on the FreeAgent Go, hand it off to a client, and show them the results—without any technical delays.”

While professional photographers like Robert Brown opt for Seagate and Maxtor storage solutions, any consumer can benefit from these drives as well, says BenHur Castro, a senior director for Seagate branded solutions.

“More and more people are pushing the technology envelope like Robert,” says Castro, “but you don’t have to be a professional to need a lot of storage capacity these days. We’re seeing more storage being consumed from home users than we are from business users, which is why we’re designing our hard drives to be convenient and easy to use.”

Note: To view more of Robert Brown’s big-wave surfing photography, visit his website.