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From the article I couldn't guess the size of the 8GB microdrive. Anyone has any idea ? One from Lacie is rather big to be tagged along with a cellphone.

As many as 60 members of the group, many of whom work in the computer field and live across the United States, tapped into their tightly controlled computer servers loaded with stolen merchandise that would fill 23,000 compact discs and was valued at $6.5 million, prosecutors said. Initially, the stolen software was sent to servers set up overseas.

23,000 CD's! Nooooooo! That's 14 x 1 TB drives.

So of the 60 members, how many had all 14 TB at home? After all, that's enough illegal mp3's to keep me happy in prison until 2034, loooong after five years plus three years maximum sentence.

Here's another idea .. instead of USB drives, give each employee one of these to move their software to and from work. They're USB .. a little bit bigger than your standard jump drive, but smaller than most external HDs.

I'm surprised no one's made a Sandy Berger joke yet .. not even the closet conservatives.

Lacie.

Their new portable bus-powered firewire drives are highly recommended (you can preorder them now; the previous models of these they were selling were absolutely required equipment for sound designers.)

I didn't see anyone else mention it.
I use various Lacie products, both Network and firewire/usb drives.

the network drives are either windowsXP embeded or linux.

Theses are both perfect for a home network.

here are some cheaper versions of their products:
http://www.lacie.com/products/clearance/products/? id=10007

here are their top of the line network devices:
http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10007

for backup servers i dont use any raid, except maybe software mirroring.
For backups its about reliability not speed, and less devices to monitor ie:no raid 3,5,... also seams more stable for a home backup.

These devices are quiet, rackable if you have that at home.

I didn't see anyone else mention it.
I use various Lacie products, both Network and firewire/usb drives.

the network drives are either windowsXP embeded or linux.

Theses are both perfect for a home network.

here are some cheaper versions of their products:
http://www.lacie.com/products/clearance/products/? id=10007

here are their top of the line network devices:
http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10007

for backup servers i dont use any raid, except maybe software mirroring.
For backups its about reliability not speed, and less devices to monitor ie:no raid 3,5,... also seams more stable for a home backup.

These devices are quiet, rackable if you have that at home.

You can get it refurbished for $1,129 US

Once you understand that RAID is reliability strategy and are prepared to have appropriate backup measures in place, then RAID 5 becomes an attractive option for the home network. I've recently looked at several options.

• LaCie Biggest Disk - Cheap but of questionable reliability. Since RAID systems should be reliable above all else, I would rule this out.
• Buffalo TeraStation: An interesting product but again reviews are pretty mixed.
• FirewireDirect Vanguard V5: Solid offering from a company that focuses primarily on larger scale storage solutions.
• NetApp: A well regarded product primarily aimed at corporate users.

In my case, a three disk RAID 1 solution proved more appropriate than RAID 5. I value high reliability on the home system and wanted to use a rotating third disk as a backup in the event of catastrophic data loss (e.g. house burns to ground). FWIW, I also use a DAT for differentiatial backups. For many users this may be overkill -- sacrificing three disks plus fixed hardware costs to greatly reduce potential data losses -- but for priceless coding projects and digital pictures, this might be good for you as well.

For some users working with video or having large audio collections, much larger disk systems may be desired. First make sure that you have an appropriate mechanism for backing up a terabyte or three. Then, the Vanguard V5 may be an excellent solution if the $2-3k price is acceptible.

Like one of these. I have a non-RAID LaCie and it's nice and fast, and you can physically move it around since it has it's own case and works over firewire.

I don't have RAID because I back it up to another computer once a week (a Linux box with massive RAID.. I do the backup with rsync patched to send resource forks correctly). I'm not a pro photographer so I can stand to lose a week's worth in the worst case. Your friend needs a backup strategy (maybe just buy a second drive and sync them up once a week or night.. there are several strategies here). You want both a backup for reliability (RAID takes care of that), and a backup for those occasional "OH SHIT I JUST DELETED THE ENTIRE SHOOT" moments (doing a regular backup to another disk will take care of that).

You can also get various utilities to manage the photos, while we're on the subject.

I definitely don't use DVDs or anything like that, I consider them very ephemeral. I just make sure my important files are in multiple places, and I buy new hard drives every couple of years and copy everything over.

If you had been able to see the site before it got submerged by the slashdot wave, you would have seen that these Lego blocks also support the IEEE1394a standard.

Okay, I just checked the manufacturer's site (LaCie), and they are, indeed, USB 2.0 only - no FireWire in sight, sorry.

Here's a link to the datasheet (PDF):

http://www.lacie.com/download/datasheets/brick3-5_ en.pdf

low power soho server do not use a laptop as a server. do not use 2.5 inch drives unleess your going to buy one of those fancy new sun servers with 2.5" Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. whatever nas/raid solution you do decide on you want to use as few drives as possible to conserve power. so think carefully about weather you want to stripe two 500gig drives or mirror or move to one of the raids that requires more than 2 disks. you need a router right? so now what do you need this server to do? does this server really need to be on 24-7? or is it just a big digital closest? get a router that has a built in print server like the ones from asus. i have one and its the print server and a ftp server useing a flash drive for super low power 24-7 access. this way the raid solution doesnt have to be on in order to access the printer. maybe someone has some info on the lowest power routers out there? figure out your raid level needs, server procccessing needs, and your bandwidth needs first. if the server is just a file server then there are a bunch of low cost nas solutions out there that use very low power proccessors and just do file server related tasks. I WOULD LOOK CLOSELY AT THIS AS PART OF A SOLUTION. this way you turn it off when not in use. if you need more proccessing power on the server then your going to have to first figure out your bandwidth needs to the raid array. many adapter based solutons require 64bit pci slots versus if you can get by with usb or firewire bandwidth from the raid then you can get an external raid array like one of these.. http://www.wiebetech.com/products/rt5.php http://www.fastora.com/product_index.php?doc_name= raid-300 http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1060 0 there are all sorts of low power front ends you could mate up to these i think. plus, that way you can work directly off the array from your laptop or connect it up to the server. maybe even just plug one of these into a asus/dlink/netgear storage router?? the question is the server has to be able to handle a terrabyte of storage i guess. personnally i would look at the "home theater pc" thing seperately. but some people may argue to set up a htpc with the raid attached to it depending on use. if (like me) all you want to do is watch divix/xvid etc then get a lower power single drive device that you move data on to in order to play it on the tv. just think, do you need to have both the raid array and the htpc on at once? if you want to use mini-itx and build your own then get a fanless one. i have been useing a mx266 from www.bcmcom.com it has sata, cf slot, dual nics, mini-pci for wireless nic, and the 1ghz eden proccessor. i have yet to run this board fanless though, but i think its possible with a aftermarket heatsink. whatever board you get boot it from compact flash. i think that will use less power but im not really sure. with mini-itx you get one 32bit pci slot so if you dont use a usb/firewire raid array then you may end up having to use that slot for a controller or adapter for the raid array. baisicly you need to first put more time into visuallizeing your use patterns and needs.

("non-serious" I'm thinking you mean "serious"...)

LaCie and NEC will be happy to hook you up... For a price. The LaCie 319 and 321 are both LCDs with amazing colour (for an LCD) http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10016 [lacie.com] if you are interested. They are damn expensive though, and it's their still image that's good, not their moving one. You can also look at NEC as LaCie doesn't actually make them, NEC just makes them to LaCie's specs so you can get the same screens from NEC in a different package.

LaCie and NEC will be happy to hook you up... For a price. The LaCie 319 and 321 are both LCDs with amazing colour (for an LCD) http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10016 if you are interested. They are damn expensive though, and it's their still image that's good, not their moving one. You can also look at NEC as LaCie doesn't actually make them, NEC just makes them to LaCie's specs so you can get the same screens from NEC in a different package.

So if you want good LCD colour, you can get it, but it will cost you. All in all a CRT is still the best choice, since it still had better colour and since CRTs handle motion fine, but if you want something that's small and good for graphics, these will do what you want.

I was going to stick in 4 300Gb drives and a SATA RAID card, but now it looks like this will be impossible.

Why compromise the cooling of your computer instead of going with an external SATA case like this one

If the order of purchases was to be reversed, I would purchase a Firewire/USB2 external hard drive, which would be bootable on the Mini.

http://www.lacie.com/products/family.htm?id=10007

- Mike -

I recently bought a LaCie ethernet disk 1TB at work. It's mostly used for backups and a couple of office file shares. We've had it for about two weeks and so far so good. It runs Windows XP embedded and can be joined to the win2k domain. Actually, it's just a standard PC with a VIA 667mhz cpu, 128mb RAM, and two 500gb hard drives. I've managed to hack it so I can reach Explorer and a command prompt, and run scripts and all that stuff. I probably could have built one of these..

Recently, a friend asked me to look for a cheap NAS solution. One of his (many) requirements was native interoperability with MacOS 9. Most NAS solutions integrate well in an environment with modern OS versions, but don't play nice with older SMB or AFP versions.
  I looked for weeks, until I found this goodie from Lacie (a french company known for its MAC products): http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1059 4

compatibility:
Windows® 98SE*; Windows® 2000*; Windows® Me*; Windows® XP (SP1 & SP2); Mac® OS 9*/X, Linux 2.4 & higher*
* Only on the Ethernet network

It has everything he wished for, it's cheap and easy to use.

If compatibility isn't an issue, just google around for some reviews. If I remember correctly, most of the reviewers were quite impressed with the solutions from SimpleTech: http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/i ndex.php

Try this product...

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1048 1

Not quite the same as an iPod and not quite as easy to use, but nifty anyway. (Yes, I got one - it has some flaws, but it's pretty neat.)

1 TB

2 TB

And far superior quality. WHAT YOU SAY? They're not "on the market" yet? Yeah, that's true.

This one is 800 GB, and it's available.

WHAT YOU SAY? It's not a "hard drive" but an ethernet disk?

Oh. Well you got me there.

1 TB

2 TB

And far superior quality. WHAT YOU SAY? They're not "on the market" yet? Yeah, that's true.

This one is 800 GB, and it's available.

WHAT YOU SAY? It's not a "hard drive" but an ethernet disk?

Oh. Well you got me there.

1 TB

2 TB

And far superior quality. WHAT YOU SAY? They're not "on the market" yet? Yeah, that's true.

This one is 800 GB, and it's available.

WHAT YOU SAY? It's not a "hard drive" but an ethernet disk?

Oh. Well you got me there.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/
http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10033
http://www.adstech.com/products/USBX-888/intro/USB X_888_intro.asp?pid=USBX-888
http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp

As a future project, I was thinking of building a RAID 5 solution from stock parts, but then I came across this

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1032 6

Which seems not to be much more expensive than building your own. The same company has a nice line of other desktop and network drives (I have no connection to this company whatsoever).

Drawbacks?

Check those out - their mobile hard-drives come in USB 2.0 and FW/USB2.0 flavors. I own a USB2.0 drive, but I saw the FW model in my local Apple store - looks identical, utilises 6-pin cable, light and gorgeous.

Also, on their web-page you can find all the dimensions and other specs - check it out, highly recommend.

They do have larger ones in terms of hd capacity, they also have much smaller ones in terms of external size. Check all their product line, with smallest Data Bank:
http://www.lacie.com/se/products/range.htm?id=1003 6
I get a chance to touch it, and this is really beatifull piece of hardware, i would choose just because of great esthetic value.

Kirby

These are definately a great value for doing backups and aren't stupid slow like tape drives.

LaCie Bigger Disk
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1046 2

You can 1TB of RAID (RAID levels 0, 0+1, 5, and RAID 5+hot spare) for $1500 from . I imagine other manufacturers have similar offerings.

As probably half the responses will say, use tape drives. They are affordable and store very large amounts of data.(500GB) Also, LaCie drives can come be about 2TB(or 1TB after formatting ;-) 2TB drive: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1059 8 Last time I checked, it was about $5,000 for 1TB, so get 2 1TB drives and never have to worry about space again.

Go to this LaCIE website. They still make High Res CRT with high color accuracy. As far as I know, CRT are still prefer in print production, pro video, and gaming.

I've had trouble with data corruption on those drives. Their cooling is effectuate by a couple vents and I believe this is the problem. Porsche name be damned -- I'd buy their other external drives before I bought another one of these. (What's worse, their nice metallic-looking sheen is fake plastic. And it feels like that -- fake and plastic (talking about the Porsche enclosures).) Get a non-Porsche drive. They have a wide selection.

Behold the beautiful. External storage as pretty as your mac and at a price mac users can obviously afford.

Lacie Biggest F800... RAID hot swappable drives.
Stack that with 400 GB drives and it's far smaller then the beast of a machine that they need to read the holographic drives.

Or if you don't need hot swappables, just go with their 2GB Bigger Disk. Either way, they've got a max speed of 85MB/s, which is almost 3x the speed of the holographic drives.
I'll say again, these are only useful if you have a HUGE optical platter. Otherwise, you're not going to be saving space and you'll actually be sacrificing speed.

Lacie Biggest F800... RAID hot swappable drives.
Stack that with 400 GB drives and it's far smaller then the beast of a machine that they need to read the holographic drives.

Or if you don't need hot swappables, just go with their 2GB Bigger Disk. Either way, they've got a max speed of 85MB/s, which is almost 3x the speed of the holographic drives.
I'll say again, these are only useful if you have a HUGE optical platter. Otherwise, you're not going to be saving space and you'll actually be sacrificing speed.

500 gig native.. with 38MB a sec... I think Id bench that vs Lacie 1.6 tb disk...
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1055 1
The really scarry part is data retention.. Most US companies need to keep 7 years of backups, but have you ever tried to restore a 7 year old tape? Its like impossible.

The 20" Apple Display is a low-end panel. If you want to compare LCD to CRT, try a 23" Apple Display.

Don't forget, LaCie are also making the LCD equivalent of their Electron Blue: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1050 3

you do have to wonder why they would put one in the mini though. there is no hope of adding an internal firewire device.

Sure there is. You just have to take out the existing optical drive first.

There are slim optical drives that use Firewire; perhaps Apple simply wanted to keep their options open. As noted before, at least one model of G4 had an internal Firewire drive that normally went unused.

LaCie recently announced their F800 desktop RAID solution. 1.0, 1.6 and 2.0 terabyte models are available. The array connects to a host computer via IEEE1394 (Firewire) or USB 2.0. The array can be configured as RAID levels 0, 0+1, 5, and RAID 5+hot spare. PriceGrabber lists the 1.0TB version for just under US$1500 and the 1.6TB for US$2700.

LaCie recently announced their F800 desktop RAID solution. 1.0, 1.6 and 2.0 terabyte models are available. The array connects to a host computer via IEEE1394 (Firewire) or USB 2.0. The array can be configured as RAID levels 0, 0+1, 5, and RAID 5+hot spare. PriceGrabber lists the 1.0TB version for just under US$1500 and the 1.6TB for US$2700.

But you couldn't pay me to get in front of a CRT anymore. My eyes won't take it.
In gerneral, I'll agree with you, but the color correction kills me for digital photography work, so I bought a Lacie ElectronBlue 22. It's really not bad at all, even up close. But then again, the machine I stare at all day has 2 decent LCD's attached to it, and I wouldn't give that up for anything.

But seriously, how are they mesuring the quality of year that it will be? By just size, maybe you're right, but then again, you could just hook up as many SCSI drives as you'd like, and when you run out of those, create yourself a SAN.

I manage the tech/training for student publications at a university. Our server is an Apple Xserve supplied by OIT. It works great but we do not let them back it up because it is prohibitively expensive.

Our solution was to buy a couple 160GB FireWire LaCie hard drives. They have heavy-duty aluminum cases and USB2, FireWire and FireWire 800 interfaces. I use CMS Products' free BounceBack Backup Express software to automatically syncronize the files on the server to the files on the hard disks.

It works great. It mounts the server's drive and updates only the files that have changed. We have two drives and alternate backing them up so there is always one off site (my house...ha) in case the building burns down.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1055 1

True, "cía" is short for "compañía" (company) in Spanish. In French you get this.

Only $2199. Been available for a while now, there's probably a Slashdot story about it too.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1055 1

LaCie has an external FireWire800/USB2 external drive available for about $1000, see here.

No, definitely this year:
Lacie portable 1TB drive

Sooner than you expected, wouldn't you say? ;)

Last time I checked you can't write to a CD-ROM, so you'd need a USB key anyway to store your settings. Otherwise you're starting from scratch every time you boot up. Assuming this MP3 thing is writable, it's more like MandrakeMove where you can take your settings and your entire OS from one computer to another. It's not just meant to be a rescue disk. It's more like Knoppix plus a USB key. Those of us who need rescue disks can build them ourselves.

Obviously this device isn't meant for you. That doesn't mean it has no purpose or shouldn't be marketed at all. Don't like it? Don't buy it. Hurray, capitalistic freedom of choice. I'll never understand why it is that when people don't see a need for something in their personal life, they consistently take the attitude that the object or technology in question is pointless and shouldn't even exist. THAT, is what I don't "get". Seems like these kind of posts are all over the place every time a new technology or piece of hardware or software comes out. It's a big world, why can't you just let people do what they want as long as it doesn't hurt you? Why tell the rest of us that there's a "limit" just because you can't see the point? Why does there need to be a point? I'm sure you'd be similarly annoyed by people saying they don't see the point of rescue disks and why should anyone bother, blah blah blah, etc.

More on-topic, I can't wait to see more FireWire flash drives and keys. Imagine a FireWire compactflash card reader with an 8GB microdrive in it... You could partition it and install Mac OS X, Linux, Linux PPC, and Windows and be able to boot at least one of those on any modern desktop computer. Of course Windows is the least portable of the bunch, and the least compatible with the other filesystems. Might as well not even bother. But you would probably need a FAT32 partition to exchange data between HFS+ and your chosen filesystem on the Linux partition(s). I don't know that for a fact though, maybe Mac OS X can read Ext2/3 and others.

Damn, that would be interesting. Anybody know if it's actually possible to boot multiple operating systems from one FireWire drive? You could boot to a boot manager but can the boot manager then load the OS, or will a special boot manager need to be created for FireWire drives? And then of course there's the mixing of Mac and PC operating systems on the same disk. The file systems can coexist fine, but can they all be booted from the same drive? I think the boot mechanisms are vastly different between the Mac and PC platforms. Are the differences insurmountable?

Of course with the easy daisy-chainability of FireWire (without any massive performance penalty) you could always have one Mac drive and another PC drive and just hook them together after you boot up the main one. Seems like that would work rather well. And if you get a portable jobber it will even be powered by the FireWire bus. Damn, Lacie has portable combo FireWire/USB drives now up to 100GB, with a 60GB version at 7200RPM...

Whelp, looks like I just talked my bad self into a new pet project. Goodbye paycheck!

Lacie's Bigger Disk. 1 TB with Firewire, Firewire 800, and USB 2.0.
That's how I'd upgrade. Either that, or chain along up to 64 drives on each Firewire bus, or 128 on each USB2.0 bus.

-T