LaCie on Tuesday announced that it is using 500GB Hitachi hard drives in its 2TB Biggest F800, 500GB Ethernet Disk mini and 2TB Bigger Disk Extreme external drives. The company noted that it selected Hitachi because those drives were ideally suited for use with digital video editing, RAID storage and other high-bandwidth needs, although it didnit provide specifics.
Biggest F800 ($2,999) features a four-bay configuration that can be set at RAID levels 0, 0+1, 5 and 5+hot spare, along with FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports. An alarm alerts the user if the system overheats or a drive fails; in RAID 5 use, it automatically begins rebuilding faulty drives. Ethernet Disk mini ($599) can be added to a network through its Ethernet port or connected to a computer via USB 2.0. Bigger Disk Extreme ($2,299) offers built-in RAID 0 configuration and connects via FireWire 800.