Seagate, LaCie Go Big On Storage Capacity With New Glut Of Storage Devices

Seagate and LaCie came to CES with armloads of new storage devices, and the first thing that jumps out at you about the whole schmeer is the impressive capacity of the lot of them. And capacity, it seems, was indeed a focus.

“People around the world are in urgent need of space to store their most cherished memories, information and data, so we at Seagate are on a mission to provide people with the space they need for all of their lifelong experiences,” said Scott Horn, VP marketing. “To keep pace with changing needs and demands, we have to remove limits around design, function, form and features.”



First up is the Seagate Backup Plus FAST ($299.99), a portable drive with a whopping 4TB capacity. Seagate boasts that the device can also double the speed of competitive offerings. The drive comes with Seagate’s Dashboard software that allows you to backup and access content from smartphones and tablets to a cloud service.

The LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 offers transfer speeds of up to 10 times that of USB 3.0 interfaces at 1375MB/s. It’s designed to allow streaming and editing of 3K and 4K video, and it’s coming in Q1 2014. It has a pair of 500GB PCIe Gen 2 SSDs in RAID 0, two Thunderbolt 2 ports, daisy-chain capabilities, and AES 256-bit encryption.


Another intriguing Lacie external storage device is the LaCie Sphère, a handcrafted silver-plated steel orb that offers a USB 3.0 interface and 1TB of storage capacity for (gulp) $490. The device doesn’t require a power cable.

It’s not just straight-up capacity that Seagate and LaCie were focused on--mobile storage is front and center, too. First of all, Seagate has partnered with Lenovo to put serious storage in the Lenovo Yoga 2 ultrabook. The device offers 500GB of capacity courtesy of a Seagate 5mm Laptop Ultrathin HDD; Seagate’s 5mm Ultra Mobile HDD will also be in the Haier Computer 13-inch Sailing P13A tablet/PC.


For LaCie’s part, the company is offering a 1TB storage solution for iOS and Mac devices called LaCie Fuel. The $199.99 device has a USB 3.0 interface and WiFi 802.11b/g/n, and it creates its own WiFi network with a 150-foot range so that up to five devices can access the content stored on it simultaneously. It doesn’t actually need to be connected to the Internet, mind you; it’s essentially standalone device, although it can connect and function as a wireless access point. Users can easily move content between their devices and the Fuel wirelessly or via drag-and-drop on your desktop. It also has Airplay compatibility.

Finally, Seagate is expanding its Seagate Rescue data protection service to several more retailers in the U.S. and Canada, and the additional coverage will be for hard drives and laptop and desktop storage alike.

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