Review LaCie has long prided itself on taking a somewhat more idiosyncratic approach to hard drive styling than its rival manufacturers do.
LaCie’s Starck: not so much Iron Man, more aluminium, man
As the business has been gradually taken over by the companies that make the drives themselves – Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung and so on, all of whom have lower manufacturing costs than the likes of LaCie, the French company has dared to be different in order to differentiate.
Who can forget its bullion-style Golden Disk, the Lego-esque Brick, or the oddly named Skwarim, a small, pink square of a drive?
LaCie’s obsession with design continues with its latest offering, a portable drive styled by none other than Philippe Starck, he of 1950s-space-rocket-style lemon squeezer fame. Whether the man himself sketched out the LaCie Starck’s contours and curves, leaving the filling in work to junior members of his studio a la Rembrandt, or did the lot himself, we can’t say. Either way, this is not your everyday drive enclosure. Read the rest of this entry »
Review LaCie was among the first hard disk manufacturers to produce high capacity, multimedia storage devices designed for media playback. These hard drives, equipped with A/V interfacing, enabled you to take your digital music and video files away from your computer and play them on a decent hi-fi and a full-size TV screen. With its new LaCinema Black range, LaCie has gone a step further and produced a full-scale set-top box.
Screen idol? LaCie’s LaCinema Black MAX
There are three models in the Black range, starting at around £280 for the Black PLAY, which is essentially a straightforward media server. However, we decided to test the top-of-the-range Black MAX, which costs a hefty £420 with 500GB hard disk or £505 with 1TB. That’s expensive, but the Black MAX does make an ambitious attempt to combine a network media server and a set-top DVR in a single unit.
The glossy black box measures around 9in wide and deep and a little under 2in high. It’s larger than an ordinary hard disk, but still only about half the size of our Sky+ box. A quick look around the back reveals a good selection of input and output options, including a digital TV tuner. However, at this price you might have expected two separate tuners, so that you could record one programme while watching another. Read the rest of this entry »
Review For anyone technically minded and with time to spare, there are numerous network-attached storage (NAS) solutions available at low cost. However, there is a fast-growing market for the ‘appliance’ Nas that you plug in, switch on and use straight away on your home or small office network with a minimum of configuring. The d2 Network from LaCie tries its best to fit into this latter category and mostly pulls it off.
LaCie’s d2 Network
The d2 Network is built around a single hard disk in a compact (160x44x173mm) metal case weighing 1.5kg. We tested the 1TB model, although 500GB and 1.5TB versions are also available. In keeping with LaCie’s love of the sci-fi look to its product designs, the case of the d2 Network was created by Neil Poulton (www.neilpoulton.com) with a singular practical purpose in mind: the grooves on either side are intended to help dissipate heat from the device without the need for a fan. This is a cute marketing idea but single-disk external drives are usually fanless anyway because they tend not to generate enough heat to need one.
The d2 Network comes with a base stand for vertical positioning, if preferred. The manual indicates that you can also simply rest the drive flat on one side, or rack-mounted with other d2 drives, although it is not clear how this might affect the purported heat-sink action of the ribbed casing. Read the rest of this entry »
