Storage device maker LaCie plans to use next week’s NAB 2001 conference in Las Vegas, to introduce a new line of hard drives — the LaCie Fast FireWire series. The new drives sport sustained transfer rates of 35MB per second, with burst performance up to 45MB per second. The drives will be available in storage capacities from 20GB to 75GB. LaCie claims that the new drives double the throughput performance of low-cost ATAPI drives in the FireWire environment.
LaCie Vice President of Marketing and Sales Guillaume Mazieres said that the performance bottleneck of FireWire drives has been the bridge between the drive’s ATAPI interface and the IEEE-1394, or FireWire, interface.
“With our new two-chip, single firmware interface design we’ve virtually eliminated the performance barrier by producing drives that can consistently deliver 35MB/s sustained data throughput to the computer. The new Fast FireWire hard drives open up the data pipe that today’s higher performance video production and content development computers can handle,” said Mazieres.
The new drives are fully ATA 100 compliant, and support Ultra DMA mode 5. The drives provide an access time of 9 milliseconds, as well. Each drive incorporates an enclosed, integrated power supply and two 6-pin IEEE-1394 connections. Drives include an IEEE-1394 cable, also. All the drives include LaCie’s own Silverlining 6.3 drive formatting and utility application, and are plug-and-play compatible with FireWire-compatible Macs and PCs.
LaCie said the new drives would be available starting at US$573. The drives will be sold through authorized resellers starting in May.