Asustek Computer plans to offer buyers of its popular Eee PC low-cost laptop additional storage for songs, videos and other data via the Internet.

Starting Tuesday, buyers of the Eee PC 901 will be able to use 20G bytes of online storage to complement their laptop's internal storage. Most Eee PCs come with small flash memory-based storage space, a limitation for people who like to carry around music, photos and other data.

But Eee Store is designed to expand the amount of data a user can store and access using their Eee PCs. Eee PCs can come with as little as 2G bytes of internal storage on the cheapest models, up to 20G bytes on the Eee PC 900, which launched in April.

"We're providing Web storage and we're using shock proof [flash] storage," said Jerry Shen, CEO of Asustek, in a briefing. "We think this is more flexible, we give the user remote storage on the Web and internal storage that's shock proof."

SSD (solid state disk) flash memory drives are shock proof, meaning that if a person drops their notebook computer, stored data is safe because SSDs have no moving parts, unlike HDDs (hard disk drives), which can break from such a shock.

Data will be stored on servers owned by Asustek and managed by Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's largest phone company.

People will be able to use Asustek's Web storage free for one year.