Last Friday, Power Mac Center had the grand launch of the LaCie brand of storage solutions. LaCie is the premium product line of Seagate Technologies , a company widely known for it’s hard drivers and USB flash drives. Present during the launch is the Product Manager of Power Mac Center Miss Princess LaoSantos and Mr. Sam Zavaglia, the Senior Field Applications Engineer of Seagate Technologies.
There are 2 product lines that LaCie introduced during the launch, the Porsche Design Series and the other , the Rugged Design Series.
The Porsche Design is a collaboration between LaCie and Porsche. The Porsche Design aims to pack in the latest technology in presently found in hard drives, but still offer it in a very sleek, and attractive package. The product line currently consists of 4 products namely , the Porsche Design USB key , the Slim Drive, the Mobile Drive and the Desktop Drive all Hard Drives except for the USB key. All of them have USB 3.0 for fast data transfers, while the Slim drive, the Mobile drive and the Desktop drive now carries the new USB Type -C Connector. Storage capacity starts at 16 gb for the USB key up to a whopping 8 TB for the Desktop Drive while the SSD option of Slim Drive ranges from 120 up to 250 GB. A unique feature of the Desktop Drive is the ability to power up the whole laptop while still connected to the hard drive via the USB type C connection. Basically, if you have the new Macbook with the type C connector, if you connect it to the Desktop drive and the Desktop drive’s power outlet is connected, it can automatically charge the Macbook which is pretty awesome.
The other product line which is the Rugged line. If the Porsche Design is all about sleek design, the Rugged line is on the other side of the spectrum. These are shock resistant, water resistant hard drives designed for people who likes to live dangerously( with their hard drives). There are currently 5 products in the Rugged line, namely the Rugged Key, Rugged Triple , Rugged Mini, Rugged Thunderbolt and the Rugged Raid which is the current flagship model. Like the Porsche Design, the Rugged uses USB 3.0 technology, is Shock Resistant from 1.2 meters of the Rugged Mini up to a staggering 100 meter drop of the Rugged Key. They are also Pressure resistant up to 1 Ton, meaning these hard drives can be run over a car and you can be rest assured that all of your data is still safe. All hard drives are also water resistant, though the ip water resistance rating was not specified. Storage sizes starts at 1 tb of the Rugged Mini up to 4 tb of the Rugged Raid. Only the Rugged Triple has Firewire connection , while the Rugges Thunderbolt and the Rugged Raid has Thunderbolt Connection up to 387MB/s.
Out of all the products that was introduced, the Rugged Raid was the one that caught my attention. Unlike the other products in the LaCie line, only the Rugged Raid employs a dual HDD setup ( 2 x 2TB ). With this setup, the user can setup the hard drive in 2 ways, one is the Raid 0 configuration and the other, the Raid 1 configuration. In the Raid 0 configuration, the read and write speeds of the hard drive is technically doubled due to the hard drive writing or reading it’s files on both harddrives. This was demoed to us by Mr. Sam and we saw the read and write speeds of the Raid reaches up to 240 MB/s , effectively doubling the speeds of an ordinary hard drive which is at around 80 – 100 MB/s. Meanwhile in the Raid 1 configuration, the hard drive size is being halved to 2 TB and the speed returns to the normal 80 – 100 ish MB/s. But what it does in return however is whenever the user writes a file on to the harddrive, it writes it to both of the harddrives so all of your data is more secured in case your harddrive was heavily damaged. Pretty awesome for those looking for either the super secure or super fast hard drive.
Availability of the Rugged will be at the end of May, while the Porsche will be on June and prices for the Porsche starts at Php 1,100.00 for the Porsche Design USB key up to Php 10,599.00 for the Desktop Drive while the Rugged starts at Php 1790.00 for the Rugged key up to Php 12,990 for the Rugged Raid.
