A couple of weeks ago I picked up thanks to a great post-holiday sale at Amazon a 120 GB external FireWire drive from LaCie. I love this thing. It’s stupid fast (even at FireWire 400 speeds), so I’ve offloaded some of my more space-intensive data (like various games) to it, I now perform automated weekly backups (using Apple’s Backup 2.0 software) and I no longer have to worry about the fact that my desktop hard drive is over ten times the size of the backup drive on my network server. All in all, it’s one of those devices that any power-user needs.
For my needs, that 120 GB size is just about right. It’s the exact same size as my desktop drive, so if there’s a crisis and I need to backup everything or clone the drive I can do so easily. But for the truly power users out there, LaCie has unveiled something incredible…a 1 terabyte. drive.
Yeah, that’s right, 1 freakin’ terabyte. That’s nearly ten times the size of the drive I have right now, of which I’ve only used about 40GB. For professional users of Final Cut Pro or DVD Studio this is like a dream come true. It’s small, supports all three high-speed protocols (FW 400, FW 800 and USB 2.0, plus iLink support for direct DV input) and if necessary, it can be stacked and daisy-chained for increased storage. Oh, and it’s entertainingly called “Bigger Disk.”
For standard desktop users, the falling price of storage has accelerated much more rapidly than the amount of space they actually need. But at the same time, I fully welcome the release of 1 TB drives. That uber-TiVo I mentioned the other day is the perfect use for a drive that’s 1 or more TB…if you can get 30 hours of HD video (at questionable quality) on a 250 GB drive, then you can get over 100 with a terabyte. And that’s really what I need in a TiVo. My massively upgraded first generation unit has about 100 hours of high-quality storage, which is enough that I’ve never filled it, and have never been concerned about space for new recordings. Actually, looking at the list of things currently on my TiVo, I’ll soon have a movie that’s been on there for a full year!
So bring on the terabyte drives. I’m sure someone will think of something to put on there.