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CES 2015: Seagate, LaCie announce new storage products including Seagate Wireless
The inbox at TUAW was full today with a number of CES announcements from electronics and accessory manufacturers. Some of the most exciting announcements of the day came from storage vendor Seagate Technology and its LaCie brand. First, the Seagate announcements. The company debuted a 500GB portable wireless drive called Seagate Wireless that works with just about any tablet or smartphone, in particular the iPhone and iPad. The $129.99 drive will be available early next month in lime green, cool blue, slate grey, fire-engine red and white. The idea behind the drive is to give you a Wi-Fi enabled storage center onto which users can save media such as video (it can hold up to 200 HD movies), photographs, and documents. The device can also stream the content to your TV via Apple TV or Google Chromecast. Expect 6 hours of battery life from the device. Next up are the Seagate Personal Cloud and Personal Cloud 2-Bay, wireless devices that use the Seagate Media and Seagate Mobile Backup apps to store media and provide backups for all of your devices. Knowing that savvy users like multiple backups, the Personal Cloud devices can automatically back up to online providers as well. When you're away from home, the Seagate Media app provides a way to browse and use content on the drive. The Personal Cloud device will be available later in January in 3, 4, and 5TB versions, while the 2-Bay device will come in 4, 6, and 8TB capacities. The single bay 3TB version will retail for $169, while the 2-Bay 8TB device will max out the line at $449. Finally, if you have to have the thinnest accessories around, you'll love the Seagate 7, a 7mm thick portable drive. It will retail for $99 in a 500GB configuration. As an example of just how far storage has come over the 35 years Seagate has been around, the company's first hard drive stored just 5MB of data and was over 5 inches thick - about 127mm. LaCie announced one of the more beautiful peripherals we've seen lately - the LaCie Mirror. It's a portable 1TB hard drive that will retail for $279.99. That's quite expensive as hard drives go, but if you're into design you're going to love the Mirror. It's covered with mirrored scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass, and sits on a base made of a single piece of ebony wood. LaCie also announced the Rugged RAID. It's a ruggedized RAID array that features Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ports for speed, and it can withstand 1.5 meter drops and 1 ton of pressure. There's even water and dust resistance thanks to an IP54 rating. The Thunderbolt cable is built into the case so it can never be lost. Expect to see it in a 4TB capacity for $449.99 later this quarter.
