LaCie debuts 2 terabyte Big Disk Extreme+

LaCie is a company that can't help itself when it comes to large capacity drives. Just when you thought they couldn't get the "Big Disk Extreme" to be any bigger or more extreme, they go and produce a 2TB version. Unlike the company's network drive with massive capacity, this is pretty standard LaCie fare if you look at the specs, like the 32MB cache, Firewire 400, dual Firewire 800 ports (for daisy-chaining), USB 2.0, and built-in RAID 0. The drive also features a button which can be mapped to launch an application of your choosing, though we're sure they'd prefer that it launches Retrospect Express to backup your data.

[Via Macworld]

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Jul 20th 2007 12:13AM]

If it only had Gigabit and eSATA in addition to the USB and 1394 a/b, then this would be the perfect external universal drive that I have been looking for.

[Martin @ Jul 20th 2007 12:17AM]

You're an idiot and clearly know nothing about computers.

[sschwend @ Jul 20th 2007 1:50AM]

YES!!! I agree that homez is obviously an IDIOT!!


Now.. LaCie... GIVE ME 2 TB with RAID 1

[Ryhan @ Jul 20th 2007 12:42AM]

@sschwend
1 word; "wannabe"
Join the club.

[sschwend @ Jul 20th 2007 1:54AM]

@Ryhan

What club is this. Get a new name-yours sucks.

BTW I'm just said in 2 lines what the other replys and comments below me said- 2 TB would be a huge amount of data loss. So eat a dick and LaCie Give me raid 1 protection!

[Alvin @ Jul 20th 2007 12:29AM]

XTREME!!!111!eleven!!

[AlphaGeek @ Jul 20th 2007 12:41AM]

That "32MB cache" claim smells like BS to me. I bet the marketing guys looked at the spec sheet for the two 1TB drives inside the box and added up the 16MB of cache on each drive, and voila -- 32MB cache!

Oh, and RAID 0 with a pair of 1TB drives? Yes, please, let's go for the world record on how much data we can lose with a single drive failure. Madness.

[Stefan @ Jul 20th 2007 1:25AM]

I agree, this thing is a danger to everybody who thinks there data is in any way safe on this box, if it's raid 0 you can lose everything with one disk failure.
Some people put there whole life in pictures and movies on these boxes..my god, please don't forget to back this sucker up..

[narco @ Jul 20th 2007 1:44AM]

I want to buy at least a 1TB drive to back up my two internal 500GB drives, but some people say RAID is good and others say it's bad. I'm not going to have these drives connected all the time, just briefly so that I can backup my stuff and leave. is there a good 1TB external drive out there?

Fishes,
narco.

[Robert Tonkin @ Jul 20th 2007 2:03AM]

As someone who has seen *multiple* LaCie drives fail, the last thing I would ever want is to have 2x1TB at risk in a striped drive. The only pragmatic solution for economical, normal people is to have *mirrored* (RAID1) drives storing any data you not want to lose. I had a 1TB LaCie drive (that contained 4 250MB drives) fail. Guess what? All your data is gone if even one out of four drives fails. It's time for the hard drive industry to stop scamming people and start giving them reliable storage (or at least somewhat fault-tolerant storage).

[sschwend @ Jul 20th 2007 2:10AM]

Yeah no shit, but some prick above had to talk shit on my same raid 1 idea.
You are a good man.

[LiQuiD_FuSioN @ Jul 20th 2007 2:18AM]

Nothing personal, but I'm waiting for the 5 TBs and 10 TBs to start rolling out. I know it seems a bit distant in the future, but the industry will make the jump sooner or later.

I've got like 3 500GB MyBooks now, the prices are really dropping.. I got a 500GB Essential Edition for only $129 (plus $10 tax though). I would have gotten a 1 TB MyBook, but the reviews were horrible. There's still work to be done I'm assuming, so I'm sticking with what works best right now.

[vulcero @ Jul 20th 2007 5:19AM]

RAID 0 for speed/performance. I didn't read anything about backup use. Plus, without the RAID 0, how does one expect to port 2TB data transfer rates via USB 2.0 at 480 Mbit/s or firewire 400/800 Mbit/s?

[w00t @ Jul 20th 2007 6:46AM]

narco, RAID is great in the right situation and if used properly although if you only use the drives for occasional backup I doubt you'd benefit from an array much.

You can gain performance by Striping (RAID-0) drives at the cost of reliability, you can gain reliability by Mirroring (RAID-1) drives at the cost of disk space, or you can gain an even balance by using more advanced RAID levels.

RAID arrays generally require some additional (Identical is best) drives depending on your setup, only protect you from hardware failure not data loss caused in software (Such as virus infection, file system errors, user error such as accidental deletion, etc), and there are other advantages and disadvantages.

For more information read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

[Uncle Red @ Jul 20th 2007 9:47AM]

wow. Lacie wants you to lose even more on their crappy hardware. I've recovered more files from lacie external drives then any other drive case maker. bigger they are, the more you lose...

[Mike @ Jul 20th 2007 10:26AM]

Couldn't agree with you more. Out of 20 we've had 8 crash on us. The investigators in my section won't touch the remainder!

Heat is the culprit due to a faulty design.

[cliff @ Jul 20th 2007 12:20PM]

Wow... I wonder if these are as crappy as the Lacie 2TB and the 1TB drives I just bought that have both failed on me... seems to be a heat issue.

[Brian McBride @ Jul 20th 2007 1:35PM]

A year ago I bought a LaCie big disk. 500 megs back then - internally striped 2 250gig drives.

After the thing failed on me, I realized NEVER buy Lacie. If you do a google search there are so many complaints about the quality of these devices.

Even more, as a stripped device, your data is going to cost you thousands of dollars to restore when your Lacie fails. Unlike a single drive, you can't just pull it out and place it in another chassis.

In a way, Lacie offers a poor-mans array. But you get what you pay for. If you want large, fast, storage then look into an actual media area, raid5 or something. That way you won't loose your data, have lots of storage, and speed to boot.

[Lowery M Posey @ Jul 20th 2007 3:05PM]

I at least applaud their institution of an daisy-chainable 800Mb Firewire port...BUT NO motherboard OEMs currently support Firewire b!!! I would NEVER use USB 2.0 for a disk interface because of the PIO overhead on the CPU - at least the firewire has direct DMA capability with device throttling built into the interface, which I would personally prefer over a shared Gb Ethernet port.

[Keaton @ Jul 21st 2007 2:49AM]

Hey Engadget, Your Picture is horribly wrong... Is there 1, 2tb disk in there? I didn't know they developed 2tb disks... overnight. Switch it guys...