At MACWORLD this week, LaCie has announced a new 48GB PocketDrive. The new drive features both USB and FireWire interface assuring maximum speed and compatibility, and is designed as a mobile storage solution for multimedia professionals and hobbyists. According to LaCie:

LaCie reinforced its lead in the mobile storage market today with two major announcements on its highly successful PocketDrive line. By combining the new FireWire-to-IDE bridge developed by LaCie with high-performance ATA 66 disks, the 10GB, 20GB and 30GB PocketDrives now provide transfer rates of up to 35MB/sÑtwice as fast as traditional FireWire disks. The new 48GB PocketDrive, which is making its debut at LaCieis Macworld Booth #1913 this week, will also achieve transfer rates of up to 35MB/s.

Measuring only 3.5" x 5.75" x 1" and weighing less than a pound, LaCieis PocketDrives provide Gigabytes of capacity in an exceptionally small form factor. The new 48GB PocketDrive can store more than 20 hours of MPEG-2 video, more than 70 hours of CD-quality audio or a stack of text documents more than half-a-mile high.

Offering a combination of high capacities, mobility and convenience, the LaCie PocketDrives have quickly become very popular among content developers, illustrators, audio/video professionals and people on-the-go. With both Universal Serial Bus (USB) and FireWire‰ (IEEE 1394) support, or "U&I" (LaCieis acronym and trademark for the dual-support capability), the versatile drives provide users with an easy means of expanding the storage capacity of USB-equipped computers such as Apple iMacs, and iBooks; and FireWire systems such as the Macintosh G4 workstations and G4 Cubes, PowerBooks and the iMacDV systems.

The FireWire and USB buses make the LaCie PocketDrives hot-pluggable--they mount automatically as soon as they are connected and can be removed or swapped without having to shutdown or reboot the system.

In addition, because the PocketDrive is compatible with all FireWire or USB-equipped machines, users can quickly share the contents of the entire drive with others--regardless of their operating system. The capacity and performance of LaCieis pocket-sized hard drives also make them ideal for full backups of an internal drive, including a bootable operating system.

The LaCie 48GB PocketDrive is available for US$849. You can find more information about the full line of PocketDrives at the LaCie Web site, or visit them at MACWORLD booth 1913.