LaCie's 1 Terabyte "Bigger Disk"

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118' target='_blank'>http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118</a><br /><br /></div><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/biggerdisk.jpg" /> <br /><br />"The LaCie Bigger Disk, with the largest hard drive capacity available, is a unique innovation that packs an amazing 1 terabyte of storage space in a manageable 5.25" form factor. With this unsurpassed storage capacity, the LaCie Bigger Disk allows users to store nearly two years of continuous music and up to one month of non-stop MPEG-2 video1. Truly plug and play, this device requires no driver or software installation for Windows XP and Mac OS X users."<br /><br />Sweet Lord! 8O I've got nearly a terabyte of storage in my home computing environment, but that's spread over five computers and several external hard drives. 1000 GB in a SINGLE external device? Wow...that's mind-boggling. I'd actually be a little worried about keeping so much data in once place - what happens if the drives fail? You'd need a second 1 TB drive just to back the first one up. ;-) And at price tag of $1199 USD, it's not for the timid, but then again, only the bold need 1 TB of storage. :D

[Gary Sheynkman]

That is $$$ but I'd so hit it.

Can you imagine how long it would take to fill that thing up even with USB2 or Firewire??? 8O

[Kevin Jackson]

8O

I know what I'm putting on my birthday list.

[klinux]

After this article, I did a quick calculation and found I too got approx 830 GB of HD (630 GB for PC and 200 GB for Mac) space at home! Time to do some clean up and head to eBay!

At one TB, it would take about 8 hours to fill up that sucker with FW400 or USB2 but only 5 hours using FW800.

[bryhawks]

Sweet Lord! 8O

Ha! Your comment made me laugh out loud! Of course, I echo your sentiments exactly! I've only got a mere 360GB in total, but being of archival persuasion as yourself, oh, for a terabyte!

[kagayaki1]

I'm really curious what's inside the drive. I parused the specs and datasheet, but I couldn't find anything on it. Who's the OEM on this?

-Jason

[bryhawks]

I'm curious too - is it one single 5.25" drive w/ multiple platters/heads, or is this a combination of several more readily-available 3.5" drives packed together? I didn't know anyone was producing a 5.25" platter anymore, but that might just be an indication of how much I don't know.

[Jason Dunn]

I'm curious too - is it one single 5.25" drive w/ multiple platters/heads, or is this a combination of several more readily-available 3.5" drives packed together? I didn't know anyone was producing a 5.25" platter anymore, but that might just be an indication of how much I don't know.

I'm 95% sure it's a series of 3.5" hard drives (probably four) in some sort of seamless array...

[Gary Sheynkman]

I have 14 gb :(

[Phoenix]

Crikey! That's INSANE!!!!! :crazyeyes:

Anybody need some space? Anybody makin' a movie? Toy Story 3, 4, and 5?


I wonder if they make an internal version of this drive? Now if they could only stuff this into a laptop! LOL, yeah right!

[klinux]

Agreed. I will bet it is four 250 Gb drives in a JBOD (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/jbod.htm) or RAID 0 array.

[possmann]

LOL - I love the file transfer question? So how long would it take to move eveyrthing over there via firewire or USB?

I would also feel a bit uncomfortable about keeping everthing on one huge disk like that.... Although I do back up the sensitive stuff I need to on a regular basis...

[backpackerx]

Anyone have experience with Lacie products? I've only used an older CD burner from them and have to say I wasn't impressed.

[Jason Dunn]

Anyone have experience with Lacie products? I've only used an older CD burner from them and have to say I wasn't impressed.

Indeed, not exactly a brand that screams consumer confidence. One would hope that their quality control has gotten better once they started dealing with devices that store data. :worried:

[backpackerx]

"Lacie, We're semi-ok at handling the preservation of your most precious data"

I thought that might be a good ad campaign.

[David Prahl]

$1200 isn't bad at all for such a product. However, you could build a Pentium 4 with ~1 TB of storage for the same amount of money.

[ctmagnus]

Forget the Bigger Disk. I want the Biggest Disk! :twisted:

and preferably in a Secure Digital format. ;)

[kagayaki1]

I tend to agree with the Lacie brand. If we see it come out from a mainstream hard drive manufacturer, then it might be noted as a trend. Oh yeah, the price tag needs to come down a little too.

That said, it's not too much of a premium to have all that storage in a single drive.

I wonder if it runs hot...I've always wanted to fry eggs on my hard drive in the morning.

[Gary Sheynkman]

$1200 isn't bad at all for such a product. However, you could build a Pentium 4 with ~1 TB of storage for the same amount of money.

thus making this a pretty pointless device unless you need to carry a TB of data around with you 8O

[Crocuta]

The whole backup thing would really worry me too, but that's been a problem now for a long time. The thing is, if I am going to take chance with so much data in one place, I think I'd like to put it on a drive manufactured by a company I trust. As far as I know, LaCie just buys other people's drives and put them in enclosures. I think I'll wait for a 1TB version of my Maxtor DV5000. Come to think of it, I'll probably wait longer than that - I have a good bit of room on the Maxtor still. 8)

[Suhit Gupta]

It appears that 4 300GB hard drives would cost just under $1K. So perhaps the cost of going with JBOD configuration would be fine. However, the 300GB drives are only 5400rpm and the lacie.com solution is 7400rpm. So it might be worth it to go with lacie.com after all (well if you do want that 1TB in the first place) :)

Suhit

[bitequator]

As mentioned you could buy your own drive array cage (various connections) to pack 3.5" drives...

To really consider this I'd want 1000BT gigabit Ethernet connection added. With both SMB sharing and built-in web/FTP/WebDAV server (LAN & Internet). Also, with a properly provisioned all-gigabit LAN, real centralized network storage might be workable in all day-to-day applications (at least for user data)?

But then one thing leads to another and you'd soon be tempted to ask for even more stuff crammed into the device -- router, firewall, WiFi, print, mail, redundant backup, etc, etc.. pretty soon you end up with the ultimate all-in-one blackbox wonder :)

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Mmmmmmmmm... on demand anime.. mmmmmmmmmmmmmm :lol:

[marlof]

I have a LaCie D2 160GB external firewire disk, and have had zero problems with it in about 6 months of usage. It's my portable backup disk for data from my notebook (30 GB) and my desktop (80 GB + 120 GB). Mainly, I use it to keep a third copy of my pictures and iTunes library.