LaCie Releases 500GB Add On Drives

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.

Comments

Coming to Australia soon

[Zeddicus_Z]

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.

That's a lot of MP3s

[not_cub]

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

Fear of HD editing

[benwaggoner]

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).

better translation

[Permission Denied]

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).

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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).

Re:Eh.

[JebusIsLord]

OK so... Serial ATA debuts at 133MB/s AFAIK, while the current ATA/6 Spec is also 133MB/s. Firewire runs at 400Mb/s, or rather 50MB/s if we are to convert. So yes, is a tad slower. HOWEVER, ATA/66 is generally considered fast enough for modern drives, since the average drive bursts slower than that. In fact, in a comparison of the 4 fastest IDE drives available at storagereview.com the western digital 200MB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive managed to win out with a sustained transfer rate of 16.4MB/s. I'm not even going to mention that IDE has a maximum cable length (32 inches i believe) that precludes its use externally, and firewire does not. So you were saying?