Storage peripheral maker LaCie announced on Tuesday that it has collaborated with hard disk drive maker Hitachi to bring Hitachi’s 500GB Deskstar 7K500 model to several new LaCie-branded products.
The new 500GB mechanism is being used in LaCie’s 2 terabyte (TB) Biggest F800 RAID system, its 500GB Ethernet Disk mini and its 2TB Bigger Disk Extreme solutions, according to LaCie. The company said the Hitachi mechanism’s features make it well-suited for use in digital video editing, multi-drive RAID storage and other applications that demand high bandwidth.
The Biggest F800 is a four-bay RAID system that supports RAID Level 0, 0+1, 5 and RAID 5+hot spare. The devices are encased in an aluminum enclosure equipped with FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 interfaces, and come with a “smart alarm” that notifies administrators if drives stop working right.
The Ethernet Disk mini is a networkable hard drive designed for small offices and homes. Containing 500GB of shared storage space, the system works with Macs and PCs through a fast Ethernet connection; it can also be used as a hard drive on an individual computer through a USB 2.0 interface. It’s plug-and-play and requires no prior networking experience.
The Bigger Disk Extreme can support multi-stream audio and video editing with burst transfer rates up to 85MB/sec and with capacities up to 2TB. It has a built-in RAID 0 configuration and is hot-pluggable for file-sharing among FireWire 400, 800 and iLink/DV workstations.