LaCie External HDD

A range of drives that is catching my attention are the Quadras from LaCie

LaCie External HDD

They range in size (both physical and capacity), with the 500GB being a very tidy small(ish) unit, through to the 2TB (and beyond) which are very large physically, but also with an obvious massive capacity.

The interface is USB, Firewire 400, Firewire 800, and my current favourite – eSATA.

In very rough terms, USB2 operates around 35 MB/sec transfer, which is similar to Firewire 400.  Firewire 800 doubles that, and eSATA runs at a quiet 165MB / sec (if you are transferring onto a RAID 0 configured drive, such as the 2TB).

Not everyone requires that sort of power / speed / capacity, but good to know they exist.

I’m currently running the biggie – 2 terabytes of storage capacity, but configured to RAID 1.  What that means is there are 2 physical 1TB drives inside the case, and RAID 1 means they run in parallel – I put data on one, and it is automatically mirrored onto the other drive.  If either drive fails, I simply change it out, put in a blank drive, and it remirrors itself again.

Great data redundancy.  It means I only have 1TB of actual storage capacity, but that is 1TB of PROTECTED capacity.