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Firewire

A lookworthy 500GB, bus-powered external laptop hard drive

Not long ago, laptop hard drives hit 500GB, which was, in my opinion, not a big deal. Nonstop leaps in hard-drive storage capacity over recent years have made me, and most of us for that matter, sort of desensitized, if not snobbish. Something of highest-number gigabytes has just come out and yet it already feels like "been there, done that. So what? There's going to be something bigger, soon!"

However, I'm intrigued by the Mercury On-The-Go portable hard drive that OWC announced Tuesday. This is not because it uses the all-new 500GB laptop hard drive, but … Read more

LaCie releases external hard drive with eSATA

LaCie has put another Triple Interface external hard drive on the market today, and although it looks very similar to the rest of their line (Neil Poulton also designed this one), there's one striking difference: they've included an eSATA port in addition to Firewire 400 and USB 2.0.

External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment eliminates the need to translate data between the computer and the storage drive which speeds up the process to almost triple the speed of Firewire 400 and USB 2.0. We're hoping it'll usher in a new era of hard drives featuring … Read more

eSATA to shed the power plug

If your power strips are as overloaded as mine with cords and bulky transformers, you'll be glad to hear that eSATA--a standard that gives external hard drives the data transfer speeds of internal drives--is untethering itself from its power cord.

eSATA is an external version of the Serial ATA technology used to hook up internal PCs, but today external eSATA drives need their own power supply. But on Monday, the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) announced it's working on a version that will let external drives draw power over the cable that connects the drive to a computer. … Read more

LaCie takes big to the extreme

LaCie announced yesterday its new Big Disk Extreme+ desktop hard drive, a fairly standard external drive whose standout feature is the massive capacity. It's available in 1-terabyte, 1.5-terabyte, and 2-terabyte capacities, starting at $350 ($850 for the 2TB drive). The design is LaCie's classic Neil Poulton d2 look: brushed gray body with a blue programmable one-touch button mounted on the front. Connection options include two FireWire 800 ports, one FireWire 400 port, and one USB 2.0 port. It comes bundled with LaCie's 1-Click Backup software, Silverkeeper (backup software for Macs), and two versions of EMC … Read more

LaCie Huby: Helpful USB/FW hub...or killer octopus?

LaCie, maker of storage devices, computer LCDs, and other computer peripherals, is one of the few companies to truly embrace original and clever aesthetic design. Why shove your gear into boring gray boxes (and then into a closet to hide the boring grayness) when you can encase it in colorful, whimsical designs that you want to show off?

LaCie's latest USB/FireWire hub is a perfect illustration of this marriage of tech and high design. The octopodal Huby (pronounced hub-ee) was designed by Ora-Ito, a French company. Each of the eight arms has a connector at the tip: four … Read more