I mean, netbooks would croak after powering this thing for half an hour. Every regular-sized laptop worth its salt has a DVD drive already. The market for these must just be incredibly small. I don’t know, am I wrong here? Am I suffering from tech blogger syndrome, in which I think people don’t use common items just because I write about cooler stuff every day?

I like how the Mac version is $30 more. Really, now.

The drive is as heavy as you’d expect a 3.5″ drive to be, but feels well-balanced, and since it’s meant to lie down instead of stand up, gives a sense of stability. Its little feet, which keep it from sitting flush on the table, give it a good grip on whatever surface you put it on. It also has a very healthy glow when turned on — maybe a little too healthy. Unplug before going to bed if you don’t want to dream in orange.

More ruggedesque, really

Its size is the first indication that while it is an external drive, it’s not really a go-everywhere thing. I mean, it will go everywhere, but like most other 3.5″ drives, it’s bulky and isn’t bus-powered. So what’s the point? Well, it’s a good-looking, relatively spacious drive that you really don’t have to worry about spilling your Diet Pepsi on or knocking off the table.

“Rugged,” though, is probably a bit of an exaggeration. To be sure, it’s more rugged than cheaper drives, which have no shock absorption at all and may be vulnerable to a splash of wine, but it’s not rugged in the true sense of the word. The rubber bumper helps, but the aluminum shell is thin (can’t keep the heat in after all) and the vents on the bottom provide a weak point (though they are shielded to keep crumbs and grit out). The ports are also exposed, which I didn’t really expect — a flap or little hanging port plugs might be ugly-looking, but it would prevent a lot of trouble if this thing spent a lot of time in bags.

I didn’t really test the shock absorption, because I wanted to keep this thing in one piece, but it’s established in reviews of LaCie’s other drives that it can take a minor hit pretty well as long as it’s off. It’s well-put-together, in any case, and the rubber ain’t gonna dent any time soon.

That said, I’d much rather have one of these (or their smaller brethren) with me in any situation but a controlled office-type environment. Coffee shop? This thing. On location? This thing. Outdoors? Well, maybe not this thing exactly, since you need to plug it in, but you get the idea.

Test drive

Setup was essentially non-existent, although a wizard did pop up the first time with the option of simply formatting in NTFS or having a separate partition in FAT32 to act as a go-between for Macs and Linux machines. Handy, but the second partition is limited to 32GB or less. I’m sure there’s a good reason for that, but it might have been really nice to split it down the middle and use this thing for both equally.

I performed a few informal read/write tests, and found that the stated maxes of 30MB/s over USB2 and 80MB/s over eSATA were at least within normal tolerance ranges:

• A 1GB file took about 34 seconds to transfer to the drive, and 31 to transfer from, which is right in line with the estimated 30MB/s.
• 1GB of mp3s took significantly longer: a little less than a minute, averaging about 18MB/s, while transferring the mp3s from the drive took 50 seconds at 20MB/s.
• 1GB of photos and mixed documents (about 2000 or so) took over a minute, averaging about 14MB/s, and transferred back in a minute flat, or about 16.5MB/s.

Not going to set the world on fire, but it didn’t seem to choke on anything. The “exchange” partition tended to copy large files slower and smaller files quicker. I didn’t test eSATA extensively because, if I’m honest, I forgot about it until just a few minutes ago, but a quick couple of copies put it at 60-70MB/s on average, more on the high end when transferring from the drive.

Check yourself before you write a check… from yourself

Now, this drive costs roundabout $140, which is a good $30 over the average price for a 1TB external these days. Is it worth the extra cost? Well, consider what you’re going to be doing with it. If it’s going to sit safe behind your monitor for a year, it’s probably not; it has no speed advantage and will take up more space on your desk due to its big footprint. But if you’re mobile, work in a shared space, or are just plain clumsy, it may be worth it to have one of these. Of course, its mobility is hampered by the fact that it’s not bus-powered, but if that’s not an issue either, go for it.

If money is no issue, and you’re looking to play 1080p content—alt.binaries.hdtv.h264 says hi—on your big screen TV, you really ought to look into getting a proper PC, one with one of those fancy nVidia GPU that you can use to hardware accelerate said Blu-ray rips. That being said, it looks like LaCie just came out with a stand-alone device that should play most of the HD content you “find” online. Oh, it’s called the LaCinema Rugged HD, and LaCie wants $350 for it.

The device has a 500GB hard drive, which should be enough for plenty of feature-length movies. (I generally see 1080p movies anywhere from 7GB to 14GB in size.) It works with all the major codecs including H.264 and WMV9; it works with MKV! And as we all know, MKV has become the standard for scene HD releases. So, you put your file(s) on the drive, then plug the device into your TV using an HDMI cable. All of a sudden, you’re watching Che Part One or Watchmen in full HD.

(I doubt the LaCie people are thrilled with me referencing piracy so often in this post, but, really, how many of you are sitting there ripping Blu-ray discs? Is that even legal? It happens: people download stuff.)

My one concern is that, in my experience, on a lot of the better handled Blu-ray rips have pretty high video bitrates. (Here’s Children of Men, a 1080p Blu-ray rip.) So I don’t know how high that number can climb before the device starts to choke. Video at 720p shouldn’t present any problem.

Step back. Western Digital might have a real contender in the LaCie LaCinema Classic Bridge media player and it actually supports 1080p content. The LCB is straightforward and appears to be simple to use. Plug in an external hard drive the Bridge relays all media content to your TV for playback. But this, too, will need some updates if it’s really going to compete with the WD TV.

The HDMI out is pretty clutch and the following video codec’s are supported: MPEG-4 AVI, XviD, and DivX for full 1080p playback. The best part is that it works with PCs and Macs and only costs $99.

Product Page

LaCie has a rather nice selection of NAS units to choose from, but the latest should get some attention from Mac users. Both the Big Disk Network (left) and the d2 Network (right) sport the classic LaCie design, which is obviously inspired by H.A.L 9000, and are compatible with Apple’s Time Machine.

Not only that, the d2 Network comes with up to 1.5TB of storage for $299 and supports eSATA and USB for further expansion. The Big Disk can RAID together up drives and start out at $380. Both drives can also stream media to any UPnP device. With all these NAS system now available, there isn’t a good excuse for not owning one besides, well, not having a job.

The new XL version doesn’t change much, except that it’s… extra large. It also has a little LED strip that glows to tell you everything is all right. You can find out more or buy one here; $160 is expensive for a terabyte of external storage (1.5TB for $110, anyone?), but what you’re really buying with the XL is durability. And awesomeness.

Flash drives are easy enough to lose when they actually look like a piece of technology so why even buy LaCie’s CurrenKey ’cause you know its going to get lost anyway. It looks like a coin, for goodness sake. The USB 2.0 drive is even constructed out of metal so it’s going to feel like a coin, too.

Two sizes are available with the 4GB sporting a bronze exterior while the larger 8GB has silver digs. Thankfully, they start out at $19.99 for the 4GB which isn’t that much to lose if you accidentally drop one into a Salvation Army bucket. Well, nothing to lose besides your, um, homemade wifey pics.

It’s got 5 slots for SATA HDDs, which puts it in capacity above its natural enemy, the Drobo, although the latter still has the intelligent data backup that makes it so attractive to the cautious and paranoid. I like the big “eye” but it would have been nice to have a functional display on there. It does say it has a built-in torrent client, however, which is both insane and awesome.
[via Technabob]

I’m a fan of minimalist design, and this new pair of LaCie drives are perfect, physically-speaking. They’re pretty dope inside, too: 500GB or 1TB drives running at a cool 7200RPM with USB 2.0 connectivity? Yes, please.

No word on pricing yet, but this is art, people.

LaCie desktop hard disks [via Giz]

Setting up a home storage server has long been fraught with peril. I’ve in fact had a terabyte and a half of storage space lying in NAS blocks in the past year and never stored more than a few movies on any of these devices. There just wasn’t a good, sane way to keep things updated without going through arcane web interfaces or maintaining a network disk connection that — in the end — would always fail.

That said, meet the Lacie Ethernet Disk Mini. It’s not a brand new device but I’m here to talk more about the on-board software than anything else. This is because the HipServ firmware that resides on this particular drive is probably one of the best examples of a home server that could actually be used and installed by anyone who actually lives in a house and does not have a Master’s in Information Systems.

Set-up is simple: plug in an Ethernet cable and add power. The drive boots up. You insert the included set-up tools disc, name the drive, create an admin password, and the drive begins to show up as Windows share, viewable by almost any device in your home including your XBox 360 and PS3. It also acts as an iTunes server which is an impressive feat and one sure to please those trying to create a centralized media repository for the entire house.

The drive is auto-detected in OS X and iTunes and can be mapped as a Windows drive in XP and Vista. The model I tested had 500 GB of storage and was split into “My” Library and Backup folders and “Family” Library and Backup folders. All of the help documentation is available online and the drive even stores most of the desktop applications you need to interact with it over the network.

The drive includes back-up software for both Windows and OS X. The desktop software is far from perfect but it’s acceptable. Besides — most of the good stuff resides on the web and over UPnP.

When you’re away from your computer, the drive lets you log into it at https://www.homelacie.com/homebase/signin. Once you’re in, you can upload and download media, photos, and files using a standard Browse/Upload screen or a Java-based drag and drop application. Dedicated players for most media let you view pictures and music online.

The OS doesn’t offer many bells and whistles like slideshows or playlists. It’s designed as a repository and to play very nicely with a number of devices. iTunes and gaming console UPnP compatibility alone are worth the price of admission on this system — which is, nicely enough, only $190 online for the 500 GB model.

The drive also interacts with UPnP devices fairly quickly. Dragging a file over to the music library brought it up on iTunes about five minutes later. Not perfect, but not bad either.

The problem with most home network drives is that they tried to recreate the ease-of-use found in services like Flickr and .Mac while using limited processing resources. By creating a simple, easy to navigate web-based service LaCie and HipServ have created one of the better home storage servers I’ve seen.