LaCie on Tuesday announced plans to begin shipping a new line of DVD drives designed by Porsche Design GmbH this month. The drives will offer DVD-RW and DVD+RW technologies in one device and sport FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 connectivity. The company is also offering a Porsche-designed CD-RW drive and external hard drives.
LaCie first introduced storage peripherals designed by the Porsche team slightly over a year ago. The DVD±RW Drives are available at prices starting at US$249. Bundled software will include Toast Lite for Mac OS X and Mac OS 8.6-9.x. The new $99 CD-RW drive is available with a FireWire or USB 2.0 interface. With write speeds of 52x, it can burn a full 700MB CD in under two minutes, according to LaCie.
The new hard drives range in capacity from 40GB to 250GB. Prices vary from $99 for a 40GB, USB 2.0 model to $299 for a 250GB, FireWire system. They come with a power supply and adapter cable, USB 2.0 or FireWire cable, LaCie’s Storage Utilities (compatible with Mac OS X, Mac OS 9.x and Windows), and Silverkeeper (backup software for Macs).