We started CES 2014 by meeting with Seagate and LaCie and looking at some of their new and upcoming products. Among them are a new wireless drive, a 4TB portable drive (a first), and a gorgeous silver hard drive that looks more like a work of art than a drive. Here are a few pictures of the products.
LaCie Sphere – 1TB silver-plated steel spherical drive designed by Christofle and silvered in France.
The LaCie Sphere blew me away with its great looks and sharp design. A gorgeous silver sphere, it houses a 1TB drive inside and lets you have external storage that looks great on any desk. Designed by Christofle it is handcrafted and silvered in France. The LaCie Sphère will be available this quarter in a 1TB capacity through the LaCie Online Store, select concept stores, and Christofle retail stores.
LaCie Fuel: A 1TB wireless hard drive optimized for Mac users
The Fuel is a “new go-anywhere wireless hard drive that adds 1TB of untethered external storage capacity to the Pad, iPhone, Mac, and other compatible mobile devices”. With it users can store up to 500 movies, 160,000 songs or 190,000 photos — and they can share them with up to five devices at a time. In addition the drive’s compatibility with AirPlay lets users easily stream movies onto the big screen via Apple TV or stream music to compatible speakers in a form factor that reflects the extreme design heritage of the LaCie brand.
LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt – the world’s fastest portable storage enabled by Thunderbolt 2 and ideal for videographers.
The Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 is “the fastest portable storage solution on the market”. It delivers speeds up to ten times faster than any mobile USB 3.0 hard drive and looks great doing it. As LaCie explains,
Designed by Neil Poulton the drive is ideal for videographers, providing the performance and capacity required for demanding workflow, and allowing streaming and editing of 4K or 3D video while in the field.
The drive is specially designed to make sure the heat generated while using the drive doesn’t negatively impact the drive’s performance. The result is a unique metal enclosure that houses the SSD drives and a specially designed fan. It is a technical marvel that is ready for a 4K world. The LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 will be available for purchase in the first quarter of 2014 through LaCie’s resellers and LaCie.com.
Seagate’s Backup Plus Fast – the world’s first 4TB portable drive and an updated version of Seagate’s dashboard software.
Seagate slimmed down their external drives but added a version with a huge 4TB of storage. The new drives start at 500GB and include 1TB, 2TB and 4TB and prices will start at under $100. We’re looking forward to checking them out soon.
Expanded Availability for Seagate Rescue Data Protection Plan
Perhaps the least exciting of the announcements, it is, as anyone who has ever lost data can attest, also the most important. As Seagate explains,
Seagate will also unveil the expansion of Seagate Rescue™, its new data protection service plan, to include Staples in the United States, and NCIX and Canada Computer in Canada. The new plan will now also cover hard drives and storage in laptop or desktop computers. This is the only plan of its kind, delivering comprehensive data protection on a range of storage options from multiple brands. It’s also the only data recovery service offered by the people who make storage technology.
You can learn all about the announcements here.