Hillsboro, OR-based hard drive specialists, LaCie Limited on Thursday announced the released of the company’s FireWire 800 hard drives. First introduced at Macworld Conference & Expo San Francisco in January, the new FireWire drives are available today from LaCie’s Web site and authorized resellers.
Utilizing the Oxford 922 technology, the drives range in capacity from 200GB to 500GB. The hard drives are targeted to digital content creators, who typically use large volumes of drive space for video and storing multimedia projects. According to LaCie, the 250GB model can store the equivalent of a 385 CD-Juke-Box or 50,000 MP3 songs; more than 16 hours of video content captured from DV camcorders; or days of compressed video (MPEG-4).
“With greater speed, bandwidth and distance capabilities, this generation of FireWire is bound to become the interface of choice for digital content creators,” said Philippe Spruch, LaCie’s Chairman.
The new models use LaCie’s familiar upright d2 aluminum design introduced on earlier drives. This design dissipates heat from the drive and prolongs drive performance, according to the company.
The d2 FireWire 800 hard drives also support the previous generation FireWire speeds, which operated at 400Mbps.
The FireWire devices come in four capacities: 200GB LaCie d2 FireWire 800 (7200rpm / 2MB): $469; 250GB LaCie d2 FireWire 800 Hard Drive (7200rpm / 8MB): $599; 400GB LaCie d2 FireWire 800 Big Disk: $849; and 500GB LaCie d2 FireWire 800 Big Disk: $1099.
Apple introduced FireWire 800 during Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote in January when he unveiled the 17-inch PowerBook.