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Hardware

LaCie Releases 500GB Add On Drives 393

Posted by chrisd from the big-big-disks dept.
Glewtion writes "LaCie has release their "Big Disk" - a large capacity FireWire case (400 / 500GB) with decent specs. The only thing they're not clear on is the fact that there are two drives in the case...but that only seems logical. Looks like it's only available in Europe though, so here's a link to a French Hardware site's description of it (translation courtesy of Google). Pretty cool for a portable MP3 collection. Here's the LaCie page." What's not apparant is that this case has two drives in it apparantly. Very Slick.
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LaCie Releases 500GB Add On Drives More

LaCie Releases 500GB Add On Drives

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  • And, in case you didn't notice... (Score:5, Funny)

    by srw ( 38421 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:46PM (#4816106) Homepage
    they're not clear about the fact there are two drives in the case!

  • Redundancy... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Radi-0-head ( 261712 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:47PM (#4816114)
    So is this disk as redundant as the editor's comments?

    • Re:Redundancy... (Score:4, Funny)

      by glenebob ( 414078 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:13AM (#4816268)
      It may not be apparant, but apparantly so.

    • Re:Redundancy... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by G-funk ( 22712 ) <josh@gfunk007.com> on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:35AM (#4816376) Homepage Journal
      Or mp3???

      Well by my quick calculations based on my own mp3 collection (a measly 11gb and 169 hours), 500gib is about 320 days playback non-stop for an mp3 collection, and although there are people who just collect mp3s like they're matchbox cars, I find it hard to believe anybody can identify 320 days worth of music they actually like.

      • Re:Redundancy... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by fusiongyro ( 55524 )
        Maybe it's not for Mp3s. I'm interested in converting my audio collection to FLAC [sourceforge.net] format so I don't have to tolerate loss of quality. If I do that, I computed that my puny 15 GB colletion would take up about 100 GB, maybe more. And so I have room to grow, I'd want to have more like 300 or 400 GB of free space to do this.

        I've been planning on buying a RAID set up to accomplish this. RAID, as you all know, uses more than one disk. You all know, apparantly, that the R in RAID is for redundancy. I'm not being redundant, I hope. RAID would give me the room for this, as you all know, by using one disk.

        Apparantly.

        So like, I need a lot of space. And this looks cool (though it might not be obvious). :)

        --
        Daniel

      • Re:Redundancy... (Score:3, Informative)

        by matt-fu ( 96262 )
        I find it hard to believe anybody can identify 320 days worth of music they actually like.

        Yeah, that's a lot of music. Over 7000 albums worth of music, in fact. I think that at the 500 gig point though, you're storing more than just mp3s. You're storing DivXes, ISOs, old email, etc. I built a 240G server a few months ago and I've been really surprised at how much space I've taken up on it just from being sloppy about what I keep around and what I don't.

        Another thing to consider is that if you have 500G worth of storage you can actually store your music as wavs instead of putting up with mp3s, which is a nice thing if you are seriously backing up your CD collection.

      • naw, WAV baby (Score:2, Interesting)

        by mixmasta ( 36673 )
        forget crappy mp3....

        I think flac is cool but is too little, too late at this point. With 500 gig I don't need to compress at all, saving my time, and as my music collection grows it won't outstrip hard disk gains.

        DVD iso's are a totally different story though :-P

      • Re:Redundancy... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pVoid ( 607584 )
        Hey dude,

        I don't know about you, and I'm not trying to be snob or stylish or anything, but if I go to HMV, 40% of the Jazz collection attracts my attention. That's a whole floor of CDs probably 500 days worth of music.

        And that's *only* jazz.

        • Yeah you're right, i forgot about stuff like jazz... I was thinking more rock/techno/hip-hop/rnb where 90% of what's released is utter shit...
    • Remember to re-post this comment next week when the story is repeated.

  • Coming to Australia soon (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zeddicus_Z ( 214454 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:48PM (#4816123) Homepage
    We have one of these babies in the labs right now for review. According to LaCiE they'll be released in Australia (and I would assume, althought I may be wrong) and Asia/Pacific soon - probably for Xmas.

  • 500 GB... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by urbazewski ( 554143 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:48PM (#4816124) Homepage Journal
    great --- I'll never have to delete another email.

    annmariabell.com [annmariabell.com]

  • what's also apparent (Score:3, Funny)

    by dzym ( 544085 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:51PM (#4816144) Homepage Journal
    ... is that the editor apparently cannot spell apparent. And not only did he apparently misspell it once, he apparently misspelt it twice.

  • Portable mp3's? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by neksys ( 87486 ) <grphillips AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:51PM (#4816148)
    Christ... by my rough calculations, you could hold 8,000-10,000 full albums on that sucker, if we assume that you have about 14 tracks on an album, with each track being about 4 megs. That's an ungodly amount of music - sometimes these little "comments" people add to their stories just irritate me. They seem to exist solely for the wannabe geek factor... I can almost see the submitter thinking, "Hey, what additional comments can I add that will *impress* people? I'm a geek too, right?"

    • Re:Portable mp3's? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ottothecow ( 600101 )
      why can I only get this as firewire? I WANT ONE IN MY CASE

      my mp3 server would love 500gb in a 5.25 drivebay, and that is plenty fast for playing mp3s. And if you need it faster and faster just raid-0 it and go.

      I have never really be a fan of the external drive (what good is a 48x burner on USB 1)as a nice ribbon cable has always been faster than whatever I can plug into the back of my case (external scsi exempt) but firewire and firewire 2 are looking good. Personally I prefer them to USB2.0 but I hope that the competition makes them a standard not an obscurity.

      • ITS TWO DRIVES!, its not a 500GB drive, its 2 250s. Thats still a lot of music, i've had a 20GB(18.6) archos jukebox for almost a year now and its still not full.
      • While you wouldn't physically fit this in a case since it is two drives, it is worth noting that firewire and USB 2.0 are both internal and external specs. Most firewire cards have an internal connector for firewire drives inside the case, and I've noticed it on the USB boards we've gotten lately. Serial ATA only makes sense because it is backwards compatible, but internal firwire is a much better bus...

        • Re:Portable mp3's? (Score:3, Informative)

          by cheezedawg ( 413482 )
          How on earth is firewire a "much better bus"?

          First generation 1.5 Gbps SATA is over 3 times faster than current 400 Mbps firewire, and 2nd gen 3.0 Gbps SATA will probably be out by the time the 1.6 Gbps firewire becomes a reality

          The only reason SATA can be backwards compatible is because the protocol is so dang flexible- it can also do a lot more than just standard PATA features

          SATA uses 250 mV signalling which makes it really easy to integrate it into ICs

          The 1.5 Gbps for SATA is dedicated to each port, rather than the shared bandwidth of a firewire port (the 63 devices per port or whatever the limit is)

          Native firewire storage devices are VERY hard to find, and non-native solutions are at the mercy of the firewire bridge chip on the device. The bandwidth that those chips can crank out is often as low as 12 MB/sec- nowhere near the 50 MB/sec potential of the bus or even an IDE drive.

          Don't get me wrong- firewire is pretty cool and there are a lot of good uses for it, but I think that SATA is a much better solution for storage, and I don't think that blanket claims like yours are justified.

    • Re:Portable mp3's? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 )
      I'm pretty sure the target for these isn't billy hardcores mp3 collection, or filthy mcnasties porn jamboree.

      MP3s are small potatoes. Even the most 'hardcore' I've seen have no more than a few dozen cd-rs full. It's hardly the killer app for big storage.

      These would be good in settings where one would need to archive big amounts of data, and still retain access to it in the short term. Maybe raw video footage, maybe great big uncompressed image files - blueprints or the like. I could think offhand I could use one of these to store all the ghost images of all the different workstations I would need to rebuild, and be able to carry it around.

      You know, big stuff.

      I guess someone could get one just to 'brag' about it.

      Either way, it's 2 200+ gig drives in a raid array. It's not like it couldn't already be done. You can already buy a little box to convert your IDE drive to an external firewire. So put the two together, you have this.
      • I'm pretty sure the target for these isn't billy hardcores mp3 collection, or filthy mcnasties porn jamboree

        Hey! Don't insult Philty McNasty [philthymcnastys.com]! He's a perfectly upstanding member of my community! I watch wrestling at his place all the time...

      • You've obviously never seen those DirectConnect servers that require you to share 100GB before they even let you in...

    • Re:Portable mp3's? (Score:5, Funny)

      by majestynine ( 605494 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:48AM (#4816443)
      Insert standard comments:

      -Wow thats a lot of storage for all my porn
      ---I have more porn than you
      -----You're both fucking loosers

      -When is this possibly going to be adopted by consumers?

      -How are we going to back this much space up?
      ---With another disc/drive, stupid!

      -Bah, I still use 5 1/2 floppies
      ---You are a smelly gnu/hippy

      -Wow, the MPAA/RIAA/whoever it is we're hating this week/Disney are really going to hate this!
    • 400 gigs would also be enough to hold about 1000 cds in a losslessly compressed format, which is... not enough to hold all my cds. it'd also hold about 80 or so dvds, which is.... not enough to hold all my dvds. and those aren't even interesting applications.

      it'll hold about 10 hours of 48 track 24/88.2 audio, a small fraction of an engineering firm's drawings or a small fraction of the raw video used by a film editor. people with servers that can boot from firewire could use them as a portable emergency recovery drive...

      The fact that you don't currently have a use for a nicely packaged, relatively inexpensive mass storage device does not mean that nobody needs one.

      if you really think that 400 gig firewire drives exist solely to stroke egos, go to a therapist now, because you're a pathetically insecure fuck.

    • You're a geek, but you're wrong.

      I have roughly 60 Gigs worth of mp3s, and, I SHIT YOU NOT: I haven't even scratched the surface of what I want in terms of Jazz.

      500 is just a number, and I'm pretty sure I'll get there pretty quickly if I can afford it.

  • warranty? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by halo8 ( 445515 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:52PM (#4816153)
    The French Translation Page says it has a 2 year warranty.. yet the Company page says 1..

    Odd...

  • it had to happen (Score:5, Funny)

    by newsdee ( 629448 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:53PM (#4816159) Homepage Journal
    Earlier today I bought a 80gb usb2 drive.
    I knew computers are obsolete as soon as you leave the store, but this is ridiculous. :-)

    • your 80gig drive is obsolete. (Score:5, Funny)

      by minitrue ( 213792 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:29AM (#4816340)
      Yes, your 80gb drive is now obsolete. It is completely unusable with your current configuration. Throw it out now. Or for more eco-friendly processing, please mail it to:

      Me
      c/o Obsolete Hardware Dept.
      NY,NY 10001

      We will kindly take care of any obsolete hardware you may have around your house including sub 2GHz Athlons and P4s, 64MB GeForce cards, and low capacity hard drives of 100GB or less. Do not worry about our processing fee for it will be absorbed in the premium you pay for buying the fastest neatest doodad. Click here to receive notice when we launch our innovative program for disposing of your automobile once it loses that new car smell! ;-)

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by TiMac ( 621390 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:54PM (#4816162)
    SWEET! Now according to the "expert" here [connectedhomemag.com] I'll have enough HD space on my Mac for a whole 50 minutes of video!

    Dumbass...

    • Re:Finally! (Score:3, Informative)

      by TiMac ( 621390 )
      Dammit...Shoulda hit Preview...

      "a whole 50 HOURS" of video.

    • Fear of HD editing (Score:5, Informative)

      by benwaggoner ( 513209 ) <ben.waggoner@mic ... t.com minus poet> on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:27AM (#4816323) Homepage
      Well, if you wanted to use this for HD editing...

      1920x1080 pixels
      30 frames a second
      16 bits per pixel*
      That's be 949 Mbps, or 118 MB per second.

      Or about 70 minutes of uncompressed editing on this at max resolution.

      Of course, being FireWire, it'll have a lowly peak data rate of 400 Mbps. We'd need the 1394b 1600 Mbps standard for this to be useful for uncompressed HD editing. This is why honkin' Ultra-160 RAID systems are used for this kind of work!

      The good thing is that over the air HD transmissions are a measly 19.2 Mbps. That'd give you 58 hours or so.

      * (it's YUV with chroma sampled at 4:2:0, so there is one luma bitmap at 1920x1080, and two chroma bitmaps at 960x520, all at 8 bits per channel).

      • Re:Fear of HD editing (Score:4, Informative)

        by _LORAX_ ( 4790 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:54AM (#4816476) Homepage
        Actuall for clarification...

        YUV 4:2:0 is 12 bits per pixel since the chroma is only samples every other line. YUV 4:2:2 is 16 bits per pixel.

        so thats...

        711 Mbps or 89 MBps or about (wierd) 89 minutes of uncompressed HD based on the fact that 500GB actually means 500000000000 bytes.
      • However, unless I'm mistaken (and I could be, I'm an audio guy, not video) DV video that comes form modern digital cameras is comrpessed. I don't believe it's huge comrpession, but still significant.

        Also I think YUV 4:2:0 is 12-bit, not 16-bit. 4:2:2 is 16-bit I think.
        • DV uses 4:1:1, and is about 6.5:1 compressed from the original. Works out to be 25 Mbps.

          For playback that doesn't require editing, modern codecs can look darn good at a 50:1 compression. WMV9 can do GREAT at 2Mbps at 720x480 interlaced.

  • Talk about alot of space... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spoons67 ( 621984 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:56PM (#4816172)
    But one question. Though its been made terribly obvious to us that it's two drives, does it appear as two drives to your computer? If so, how does it manage that?

  • And the site says.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by imag0 ( 605684 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:58PM (#4816190) Homepage
    ...Out of standard, considering each one of these storage units integrates two hard disks and a bridge FW/RAID, it is possible to configure them in RAID 1 (Mirroring) or RAID 0 (Stripping).

    And the answer, dear asshat, is yes

  • If only my TiVo had Firewire.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:59PM (#4816192) Homepage Journal
    If only the TiVo had a Firewire interface....

    Imagine getting 2 of these drives - 1TB on your TiVo.

    Of course, I'd want a faster processor, or parsing the "Now Showing" list would take forever!
  • "What's not apparant is that this case has two drives in it apparantly. Very Slick."

    Me passed grade 4. Me can speel grate! Me want job!

    Slashdot editors...continuing the assualt on all things grammatical!

  • When compressed via divix... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:01AM (#4816211) Homepage Journal
    Most people don't have enough movies to fill two of these things. With a couple of these, a Dazzel Holywood DV converter, and a DVD burner, you could easily go into business converting Home videos to DVDs for people.

    Whether you could make any money at it would depend upon what type of home videos they brought in, and what you got them to agree to let you do with the stuff...

    -Rusty

  • I love the translations (Score:3, Funny)

    by core plexus ( 599119 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:05AM (#4816226) Homepage
    "The case is out of aluminium and ZAMAC, a supposed alloy..." Hmmm, not sure what it is? A "supposed alloy".

    "...and can pile up horizontally on other of the same peripherals models..." Hey! Get off my other of the same peripherals models!

    "Sympathetic, the new system of comment, Ca will avoid the comment of twisted which spends their time insulting:p" Sounds like my voice recognition software is glitching up again. And many more.

  • I thought 1TB/$5,000 was cool .... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by timothy ( 36799 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:06AM (#4816231) Journal
    This was a neat story, IMO:
    ("The Amazing $5k Terabyte Array" [slashdot.org])

    That's not too long ago.

    Now, for the same money, you can get twice the storage (4 of these), *and* a decent (though not high-end) laptop; you can fit your 2TB array and associated computer into a briefcase.

    That's a lot.

    timothy
  • Hmmm, I wonder if I could fit the internet on it...

    Well, if not that, at least the whole red light district of it </sarcasm>

  • NAS (Score:2)

    by simpl3x ( 238301 )
    in addition to drives like this, Lacie intends to have a NAS storage head or unit in the future (http://www.lacie.com/technologies/technology.cfm? id=F8B7B736-7F7A-11D6-98090090278D3ED0). their AIT2 is also pretty nifty!
  • Actualy I have two drives tied together with windows spanning (220gigs), but I hope its a temporary solution. In the future I definetly plan on having at least some redundancy involved, probably the one where you take 3 drives and the 3rd stores the XOR of the other two.

  • That's a lot of MP3s (Score:5, Informative)

    by not_cub ( 133206 ) <slashdot-replies&edparcell,com> on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:21AM (#4816302) Homepage
    Pretty cool for a portable MP3 collection.

    500GB = 4194304000Kbits
    = 16384000 secs @ 256kbps
    = 3792.6 72min albums @ 256kbps
    = $20,000 worth of CDs, assuming you can find them at $5 each.

    Not to mention the fact that that's half a year of music. So pretty cool for a radio station on a mission never to play a top 40 hit ever again maybe?

    I would like to nominate "Pretty cool for a portable MP3 collection" as the most fatuous comment on slashdot now that "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" is dead.

    not_cub

  • What is not apparent (Score:3, Funny)

    by kobotronic ( 240246 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:28AM (#4816330)
    "What's not apparant is that this case has two drives in it apparantly."

    I love the little comments after slashdot story submissions. :)

  • hmmm... (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Sj0 ( 472011 )
    If you have a 500GB mp3 collection, the RIAA would like to have a word with you. ....and maybe, just maybe, it's time to get off kazaa. Seriously. Just doing some rough calculations, That's over 5,000 hours of standard quality MP3 audio. over 200 days!
  • 500GB - how many Libraries of Congress is that?
    • I'd like to keep a personal copy of the Library of Congress. Maybe two, so that I can have one version to make notes in. Can I do that?

    • Re:Help! I need context! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by io333 ( 574963 )
      Last I saw, the LOC was 13 TeraBYtes. You'd need 26 of these drives. Alternatively, Each drive holds ~4% of a LOC. Yes, I understand your question was kind of a joke, but I thought I'd do the math real quick just to consider the implications. I wonder if anyone has a good estimate of how long it will be until the typical consumer PC has sufficient storage space to hold the LOC?
      • It's not "how long until the typical PC can store the LOC?", it's "how long ago's LOC can the typical PC store?"

        How big was the LoC 5 years ago? Under a few hundred gig, I'll bet. Today's LoC is (or so I read on Slashdot so it must be true) about 13TB. So how long will it take for desktops to reath 13T? Well, at their current ~40%/yr increase, about 13-14 years. At which point the LoC will undoubtedly have swollen to about another 13-14 years worth of PC evolution. But I don't think *anyone* thinks hard drives will continue to scale for almost 15 years. The superparamagnetic effect has been looming for the past 5 years or so and lord knows how much money has managed to push it off a few more years, but we're rapidly approaching the point where the amount of energy difference between a N and a S magnetic domain is the same as the amount of thermal energy present - presto, a random collection of bits.

        Maybe materials science will surprise us once again. The road started with MR (magnetoresistive), then GMR (giant magnetoresistive) and something else whose TLA I can't remember. Then Pixie Dust, and now Pixie Dust2 (5 layers rather than 3) pushing 80Gb/sq. in (if memory serves). A 3-platter design using 3.5" platters with a 1" hole for the servo could pack just over 500GB in. Now figure buying them for $200 - suddenly ripping your DVDs to disc doesn't seem quite so stupid. My mind rebels at the thought of 5T of RAID5 storage in a 3U rack, with 2 hot-spares. I also cringe at the thought of formatting that. Or fscking.
    • 500 GB is about a fortieth of the Library of Congress, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

      Compression would bring this down, and with good compression you could bring it down to maybe a 5th of the Library of Congress considering English has, according to Shannon's estimates, between 0.6 and 1.2 (probably closer to 1.2) bits of entropy per chararcter.

      \begin{wishful thinking}
      Just wait until holographic technology hits the mass market, then we can get it onto one CD-sized disk!
      \end{wishful thinking}
      \end{slashdot post}

  • better translation (Score:5, Informative)

    by Permission Denied ( 551645 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @12:37AM (#4816388) Journal
    I'm 'merican, so be nice :)

    LaCie France launches its new "Big Disk" hard drives which hold 500 MB and 400 MB and use firewire.

    Firewire can theoretically deliver 400 Mbps, and these disks have a sustained transfer rate of 30 to 40 MB/s [Ed: note the unit change: 240 to 360 Mbps]. The casing is aluminum and ZANAC, an alloy believed to increase robustness and provide better heat dissipation.

    The disks come in a 5 1/4 inch format and can be stacked on top of each other or installed vertically in a rigid base. [Ed: vibration causes disks to fail very quickly, best not keep this thing on your desk]. Since each unit comes standard with two internal hard disks and a FW RAID bridge, it's possible to configure them in RAID 1 (Mirroring) or RAID 0 (Stripping) [Ed: he meant "striping" - Freudian slip?]

    And how much does this cost in France?

    The LaCie Big Disk 400 MB (7200 rpm / 8 MB cache) costs 999 Euros HT (1195 Euros TTC). [Ed: HT = hors taxe, no tax, TTC = toutes taxes compris, all taxes included; dollar is roughly equivalent to Euro].

    And the LaCie Big Disk 500 MB (5400 rpm / 2 MB cache) is available for 1124 Euros HT (1344 Euros TTC).

    They come with a 2-year warranty and a CD with the Silverlining utility (Mac and Windows) and the Silverkeeper backup software (Macintosh).

    ------

    Comments talk about the new moderation system at the site and the site's resident trolls. Google translation does quite a job on the colloqial 'net language they use. A nice French pr0n banner at the bottom to even things out (vis-a-vis RAID 0 stripping).

  • satellite usenet

    shouldn't take THAT long to fill 500GB with a continuous full usenet feed at 128k or 256k. maybe a week or two. More realistically, cron a binary harvester against localhost, expire articles every few days, and stream mp3's through your stereo using MServ [mserv.org] to vote up and down individual tracks. Now THAT's what I call "the sounds of the Internet" :)
  • I would have thought it was two drives (since I haven't seen any drives larger than 250 GB), but I don't see how you can fit two drives in a 6.7x1.7x10.6" case. I have an external firewire drive and it's only about an inch smaller width and depth - not much extra room in the case either. And why is there only a 2 MB cache in the 500 GB version? Since every drive I've seen has at least 2 MB cache wouldn't a two drive RAID have at least 4 MB of cache?

  • God... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Peterus7 ( 607982 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @01:06AM (#4816528) Homepage Journal
    I tried explaining this to my g/f, and why this was so neat....

    The back of my head still hurts from her smacking me...

    jk.

  • Digital Video storage claims way off (Score:3, Informative)

    by magnum3065 ( 410727 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @01:47AM (#4816673)
    I was curious about their claim that the drive can hold 2 days of uncompressed digital video since they didn't make any reference to the resolution or frame rate of the video they were talking about. I quickly found some figures here [videotexsystems.com] for storage rates for video. Based on their figures for NTSC video stored uncompressed in MJPEG format the video should run about 20MB/s not including the audio they factor in later. At this rate 500GB will only store 7 hours of uncompressed video, only 30% of what they claim. Now, I know companies like to tweak their statistics to make their products seem better, but this seems very misleading.

  • LaCie Drives (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rattler14 ( 459782 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @02:05AM (#4816734)
    I just got my external 120 GB firewire drive in the mail 2 or 3 days ago (figures they just released a new model... but it's not like i would have spent the money for the 400GB version). I must say, it works extremely well with my G4 powerbook. In fact, it't access speed when flipping between the directories is noticeably faster. They are fairly small too, i just tuck the drive behind my monitor.

    All and all, i'm very pleased with it so far. I've transferred about 60+ of files too it, never even a hiccup in speed.

    plus, it comes with all sort of diagnostics on the drive (preformatted in HFS+) format.

    definitely worth the $270, especially for a powerbook limited by the size of the hard drive you can afford to put into it.

  • WiebeTech Firewire RAID (Score:3, Informative)

    by MichaelCrawford ( 610140 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @03:37AM (#4816980) Homepage Journal
    Check out the WiebeTech Firewire Raid [wiebetech.com].

    Check out the comparitive review at barefeats [barefeats.com] in which they conclude that the WiebeTech product performs better than the competition.

    Note that if you don't have firewire hardware on your box, you can get a PCI or Cardbus card to do it. There is a compatibility list at www.linux1394.org [linux1394.org]. I'm using one of the Belkin cards in my PC, and it works well.

    Disclaimer, so you don't think I'm astroturfing: WiebeTech is my current consulting client.

  • Great For Backups (Score:3, Informative)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @09:35AM (#4817750) Homepage
    I've owned two LaCie pocketdrives for a little under a year (48gb and 30gb), and I must say that they've been a godsend for a geek like myself.

    I can store all my stuff on them. Take them to virtually ANY PC in existance, (anything with usb or firewire - just about any OS works - linux, mac, windows... no drivers required), and "it just works".

    The most practical application i've found for these drives is doing backups of my pcs or client's pcs before doing major upgrades, etc.

    I can take my Mp3 collection anywhere. I once even configured one of them to be a BOOTABLE LINUX DRIVE which I could use ANYWHERE (on older pcs, i needed a bootdisk, but the idea was still cool...)

    The only gripe with the 500gb drive is that it's too big to tote around like the pocketdrives, which fit into a pocket, run completely silent, have a shock absorbant silicone buffer, can be self-powered on firewire, etc.

    Either way, all geeks can benefit from external usb/firewire drives. Before I got them, I never envisioned needing one, but now that I own two, I couldn't envision living without them.

  • Pretty good deal (Score:3, Informative)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) on Thursday December 05, 2002 @11:46AM (#4818473) Homepage Journal
    My knee-jerk reaction to these products, especially from LaCie, has usually been, "wow, they're getting a nice premium for doing some integration". So, pricing them, I find the maxtor 250's are going for $400 a pop, add in a hundred bucks for a case/ATAFirewire bridge, and you've got only a hundred bucks left for doing your hardware striping. Probably with the right IC you could come in $50 under, but this is still a good deal.

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