January 4, 2007 9:48 AM PST

LaCie releases a flood of new storage devices

by Felisa Yang

LaCie unveiled six new products to its storage lineup today, ranging from a Blu-ray drive, to a biometric hard drive, to a RAID array.

The d2 Blu-Ray drive is an external optical drive that works with both Windows and Mac machines, via either FireWire or USB connection. It comes bundled with Roxio burning software and a 50GB Blu-ray disc. The drive reads and writes (and rewrites) 25GB or 50GB BD-R, BD-RE (rewritable), DVD+/-RW DL, and CD+/-RW. It's available for preorder for $1,149.

The Quadra Hard Drive.

(Credit: LaCie)

The Quadra Hard Drive sports four interface options: USB, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA. This drive also supports both Windows and Mac computers and comes with EMC Retrospect Express Backup Software. Only the 500GB version is currently available ($299), but LaCie plans to release more capacity options in the spring.

The d2 SAFE Hard Drive.

(Credit: LaCie)

The d2 SAFE Hard Drive is a triple-interface (USB, FW400, FW800) that you can lock and unlock with the swipe of a finger. The built-in biometric fingerprint reader lets up to five users register two fingers each. The SAFE Hard Drive also employs 128-bit AES data encryption for further security. The 500GB version is available immediately for $299.

The new version of the LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini offers a Gigabit Ethernet connection for even faster data transfers (the previous version offers 10/100 Ethernet). In addition to a network connector, it offers two USB ports for a direct connection or for storage expansion via additional external hard drives. It comes in three capacities: 250GB ($199), 320GB ($249), and 500GB ($299). With the release of the new Ethernet Disk Mini, LaCie is dropping the prices on its previous version to $119, $149, and $199, respectively. The Ethernet Big Disk is basically the same product, but with larger capacities: 640GB ($349) and 1TB ($499).

The Ethernet Disk RAID drive.

(Credit: LaCie)

Finally, the Ethernet Disk RAID is a RAID 5 network-attached storage drive that offers support for Windows, Mac, and Linux machines, four levels of RAID security (0, 1, 10, and 5+spare), and four hot-swappable SATA drives. It sports two Gigabit LAN ports and 2 USB 2.0 ports and comes with a system backup and recovery client for Windows. The 1TB version costs $999 and the 2TB version costs $1,299--not a bad deal. Both are available immediately.

All of these products will debut at MacWorld next week.