April 20
LaCie To Ship FireWire RAID
More than 700 GB storage, 30 MB/sec. transfers

by David Nagel
Senior Producer

LaCie today announced a new FireWire RAID solution that requires no special cabinet or chassis—just a series of daisy-chained external FireWire hard disk drives. That package, which ships standard with two 75 GB drives, includes a six-pin IEEE-1394 cable, an internal international power supply and LaCie's Silverlining Pro 6.3 drive utility software, which allows for RAID 0 striping.

Each 3.5" 7200-rpm desktop hard drive has a capacity of 75GB and is hot-swappable. The array offers sustained transfer rates of up to 30 MB per second. The FireWire controller built into the LaCie 75 GB drive is a 400 Mbps IEEE-1394 interface that is based on a 1394 to IDE/ATAPI bridge chipset. With FireWire support, the drive can be removed for sharing or swapped without having to reboot the computer. The drives mount automatically as soon as they are connected. There is no need for terminators, device I.D.s or elaborate setup, according to LaCie.

The arrays will be available in May. The base configuration of two 75 GB drives will cost $1,998. Other configurations will be available at the same time, including single drives bundles with Silverlining Pro for upgrading existing RAIDs. They will come in configurations of 20 GB, 45 GB and 75 GB for $399, $699 and $999 respectively. For more information, visit http://www.lacie.com.

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