by Today it is time to meet the massive king of media storage: The LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ 301201U 2 TB USB 2.0/FireWire400/FireWire800 RAID System! That’s a mouthful to say, a handful to type — and an eyeful of two terabytes of spinning storage glory for all your music and video files.
In the past, I have raved here about the big Western Digital drives and while I still like them, my current experience is nothing is going to touch — let alone beat — this new LaCie monster.
As you can see below, the LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ is loaded with ports connecting to your computer. You can use USB 2.0, or FireWire 400 or FireWire 800.
I can tell you right now nothing beats FireWire 800 on a MacBook Pro
for fast and sustained read and writes when you’re dealing with lots of
recorded HD video.
The LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ not only holds a lot of information, it takes up tons of room in your workspace. The 7200rpm drive with a 32MB cache weighs in at a mighty 9 pounds and it is 10.6 inches deep, 6.8 inches tall and 1.7 inches thick.
The thing is so big and heavy it could stop a shotgun blast or even do duty as the immigration fence between the USA and Mexico!
The LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ is, however, whisper quiet. You can’t tell it is on or working unless you watch its flashing blue status eye.
I didn’t have to do anything special to get the LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ to work with my new MacBook Pro 17-inch LCD. The drive is pre-formatted as a Mac OS Extended RAID 0 drive and boy it is super fast!
This big baby will currently cost you around $600.00USD and I bought it
my own way. LaCie has nothing to do with this review. There are no
LaCie links in this article or any links to buy the drive. I’m simply
sharing my experience with you to point you in the right direction if
you need a big, beautiful, drive. There’s nothing in it for me to
support this product for you.
I’m actually thinking of buying a second one for use as a dedicated iTunes media server for my entire Apple network.
“I can’t imagine how anyone would use all that space!” There’s a line that has been repeated many times over the last 30 or 40 years. 🙂
How much music do you have? Tee hee.
Hi Gordon!
You’re right! A year ago I was thrilled with my 1TB WD My Book. A year before that my 500gig WD My Book was the delight of my life. Bigger is always better! SMILE!
I have lots of music files but even far more raw video that I have to keep and edit and hope-for keeping safe for many years into the future!
Hi David,
This is a giant, really!
I was clueless something like this exists. Thanks for the article!
Hi Katha!
I had no idea the monster existed, either! I was looking for another 1TB drive when I happned upon this 2TB version. Wowser! It sure is fast, too. I’ve been reading and writing to it all day and it has yet to heat up even in a hot house.
A friend of mine was going through some of his cd-rs and marveling in shock at how many of them had absolutely started to disintegrate and were completely unreadable; this after having burned them four or five years ago. I wonder, what is the average shelf life of a good hard drive?
Gordon —
You bring up an excellent point about disintegrating CDs. They were never intended to last forever but, for some reason, people were sold that idea and they believed it. The metal inside any CD begins to rust over time and develop internal pitting which you can never recover from once the process starts.
If we think about it — anyone that sells us a CD or DVD is counting on the fact that we’ll have to replace it in under 10 years and buy another copy!
Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) for most HDDs is around 100,000 hours. Some are built to last longer. I wouldn’t trust any drive over 3 years old if you have it turned on all day every day and any HDD at five years is, to my mind, on its last spindle, and needs to be replaced.
The glorious thing about these massive and superfast HDDs is it makes copying stuff from one to the other easy. You just keep “renewing the copy” forever and ever and ever… without any degradation of memory or quality of product.
Are these massive hard drives recyclable? I would hate to think of land fills overflowing with our decaying photos of grandma at the 4th of July barbecue
I would imagine these big HDDs are more recyclable than CDs and DVDs, eh? This Big Disk is encased entirely in thick aluminum.
Pair Networks — our hosting service – is Green as it can be:
http://www.pair.com/environmental_policy/
Have you seen the new “Planet Green” channel? It’s my best favorite now. I think it used to be HGTV. The greatest series they have is “Life with Ed” about Ed Begley and his wacky/genius in recycling anything and everything.
I have been hooked on that channel since the day I found out that I had it. I love “Life with Ed” and aspire to one day bicycle to power my toaster.
How long have you had the channel, Gordon? I think it showed up here a week or two ago.
Ed is great. A danger in the show is the message that you have to be a millionaire to really “Go Green” like his friends Jackson Brown, Jay Leno and Larry Hagman. Ed saves the idea for us, though, by being the middle class wunderkind who is able to help make the world better by doing a little something every day that doesn’t cost a ton of money.
I’ve had it for a few weeks.
I agree about Ed – though he repeatedly says on the show that he wants to show the world that if he can do it, anyone can. 🙂 That’s a good thing.
Right Gordon! Ed sets a perfect example. He lives what he believes.
Hi David!
this looks like a good thing! i don’t really need that sort of storage, though my media files are beginning to fill up the built-in hard-drive… i may look for something smaller.
Hi Dananjay —
It’s probably smarter to have several 500Gig drives than one massive drive. You can copy between them and move things around more easily.
For super-sensitive video files and images — I put copies of everything on Amazon S3 for safe, secure, long-term storage. It’s a wonderful service.
Hi David, yes the 500gigs sound like a good idea! the s3 might not be the thing for me though 🙂
Dananjay —
You can get lots of great deals on excellent 500gig drives right now.
S3 is certainly a specialty niche — but all my gigs of backup costs me only .70 cents a month!