LaCie

LAS VEGAS--If you have a Thunderbolt-enabled computer but just can't afford Thunderbolt storage, LaCie has something that will ease the pain.

The company showed off at the start of CES the first Thunderbolt hub that also supports an eSATA connection, called the eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series.

This is a device about the size of a portable external drive that comes with two Thunderbolt ports and two eSATA ports. Users can connect up to two eSATA drives to the hub and it will instantly make them work with a host computer via one Thunderbolt port. With the other port, you … Read more

For virtually anything to happen as expected in our daily life, computer storage is needed. If you think that's a grand statement, you, like most of us, have been taking storage for granted.

Despite the massive recent flood in Thailand that affected many storage vendors, hard drives, the most common form of computer storage, are still generally affordable (and abundant in terms of capacities). However, not all other forms of storage applications share the similar pricing as hard drives. And they can get progressively pricier the faster and the cooler they get.

Here's a list of storage devices … Read more

Since Intel's Apple-only Thunderbolt standard offers up to 10Gbps of bandwidth, it doesn't seem to make sense to use it in a single-volume external storage device. This is because the device's internal drive, which would currently cap at the 6Gbps of the latest SATA 3 standard, will be the bottleneck of the whole package's performance.

LaCie, however, believes otherwise. Case in point: the Little Big Disk SSD, the first single-volume Thunderbolt storage device that's also based on an internal solid-state drive. And for the most part, it's a success.

The new external drive is … Read more

If you want a network storage device that you can leave in the living room to wow your guests, the LaCie 5big Network 2 would be it. From the front it doesn't look much like a storage device; it looks more like a mysterious item pulled straight out of a sci-fi movie or a piece of art that you're not really supposed to understand.

From the back, however, it's a dead-serious storage device with five hard-drive bays, a bunch of peripheral ports, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The 5big Network 2 is LaCie's high-end NAS server that can house up to five SATA hard drives of any capacity. In fact, it's the first from the company that can host hard drives of different capacities, thanks to its new Auto RAID configuration that was introduced a while back via the NAS OS 2.0.… Read more

If you think the Promise Pegasus is just a bit too big (and you're right!), LaCie has something for you. The company announced today that its first Thunderbolt device, the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt external drive, is now available for purchase.

This is the second Thunderbolt storage device on the market, besides the Pegasus, and the first that comes in a design that's small enough for you to carry on the go.

The new drive features a pair of 2.5-inch drives, set up in JBOD, RAID 1, or RAID 0 configurations. Measuring just 1.6 inches by … Read more

Following Synology and QNAP, LaCie today announced a major firmware update for its Network 2 NAS servers, such as the Network Space 2, called NAS OS 2.0. One of the major improvements in this new version is full support for Apple's Mac OS 10.7 Lion, which has been known to break support for Time Machine in NAS servers that previously worked with Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard.

LaCie says the new firmware will also continue to provide cross-platform support for Windows and Linux, including features and services such as SMB, AFP, iSCSI target, NFS, and Windows … Read more

LaCie today announced a new version of its rugged portable drive, the Rugged Mini, which it says is smaller yet stronger than previous versions.

LaCie claims the new aluminum Rugged Mini is 40 percent smaller than previous models, is rain-resistant, and can withstand 1 ton of pressure. The new drive is also now available in 500GB and 1TB capacities, up from just around 100GB previously, and supports USB 3.0.

The drive is bundled with LaCie Private-Public software, which protects data from unauthorized access with AES data encryption.

Like previous drives, the new Rugged Mini is compatible with both Macs … Read more

Online storage, recently and aptly called "cloud storage," is not new. Most, if not all, of the services share the same hurdle: the Internet connection. This means that if you use the computer to upload the backup files, a process that could take days depending on the amount of data to be uploaded, you'd have to let the computer run for a long time, not ideal for those wanting to conserve energy.

For this reason, LaCie, a storage vendor that's known for making stylish devices, introduced today a new cloud-based backup solution called the CloudBox. This is the first hybrid LAN/cloud-based storage service since the company acquired online backup service Wuala more than two years ago.

Essentially, this is a small NAS server that you connect to your existing network. Included software will then automatically back up important files of your choice from your computer to the device. As this is done locally, it takes much less time than when you upload it directly to the Internet. The CloudBox then will upload its content to LaCie's online storage service, by itself. This allows users to operate the computer like normal while still having a online backup solution. … Read more

It's been a while since I last had opportunity to take on a Windows Server-based NAS server, such as the Acer Aspire EasyStore or HP's MediaSmart series. And now when Microsoft fanboys are starting to worry that the company has abandoned the NAS server market, LaCie has announced its first network storage server that's based on an NAS-specific operating system (OS) from the software giant, the 5big Storage Server.

The new NAS server is powered by Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Standard operating system, which was introduced in October 2010 and is based on Windows … Read more