Hasta La Gadget!

The folks in Lacie’s hard drive research kitchen have a need. A need (dramatic pause) for speed. And a need that they have managed to sate with the shiny new USB 3.0 2Big RAID drive.

Not happy with the already huge speed-jump gained by switching from boring old USB 2.0, the 2Big throws in a RAID 0/1 setup to open the throttle even further, striping the information across two drives to reach a blistering 275MB/s burst speed. Compare that to USB 2.0’s pedestrian theoretical maximum of 480 Mb/s. Notice the lowercase b in the latter, which stands for bits not bytes. This is, Lacies says, fast enough to throw many HD streams around at once, editing and watching in full resolution at the same time.

For you and me it means less waiting when, erm, borrowing our friends’ movie collections.

The 2Bigs will be on sale early in the new year, for a presumably high price-point, and will come in sizes up to 4TB. Of course, this will be rather pointless unless you have a computer capable of using USB 3.0 peripherals at full speed.

LaCie Partners with Symwave to Introduce World’s First USB 3.0 Dual-Drive RAID Storage Solution [Business Wire]