Storage product maker LaCie today announced the addition of a new high-capacity, high-performance storage system today. The company is now offering a 180GB 3.5-inch drive that operates at 7,200 RPM.
The drive comes in LaCie’s vaunted Mega-Stol casing, which LaCie marketing and sales Vice President Guillaume Mazieres says provides the best protection against heat and shock.
“That’s an important consideration with a drive of this size because the heat surrounding the drive can go up to 140(degree)F. With a 1.6-inch internal height, most OEM casings or PCs are not ‘cooled’ enough for such a big disk,” said Mazieres.
The new drive features an Ultra 160/LVD SCSI interface, backward compatible with Ultra2 SCSI (wide) and previous generations of wide SCSI. It also comes equipped with a 4MB buffer.
LaCie claims the new drive can transfer data up to 75MB/sec in RAID configurations and up to 47MB/sec as a single drive. The drive features an 8.2 ms seek time. LaCie indicates the drive has an acoustic rating of 3.7 decibels, and it has an idle power consumption of less than 10.3 watts.
LaCie is selling the drive through resellers and mail-order companies with a suggested retail price of US$2,499. The drive comes with a 5-year warranty, and includes a 68/68 LVD cable, LVD Terminator, and LaCie’s Silverlining Pro disk utility software, for Mac or Windows. The drive is also available for LaCie’s TX12000 RAID configuration, which can accommodate up to 12 drives — that’s 2.1 terabytes of total storage capacity.