Digital Trends

LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ (2TB) September 2nd, 2007 | by Jason Tomczak

Warranty

LaCie offers a two-year limited warranty on the 2TB drive.

Price Point

At the time of this writing, LaCie is offering the 2TB Big Disk Extreme+ for $849 USD. That seems pretty expensive, until you realize that two 1TB Hitachi drives cost at least $700. The extra $149 gives you a gorgeous RAID 0 enclosure with USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800, not to mention access to LaCie's excellent support team, should you ever need them.

Several readers have commented that it could be cheaper to get four 500GB drives, or even two 1TB drives. True, it could be cheaper, but if you want to continue to have countless drives and cases to manage, and if you want data strewn haplessly over separate disks, then by all means, go cheap. If you want one simple repository for your data, if you want to ease management, save time, and free yourself of drives, power cords, and clutter, then a 2TB drive is brilliant.

Caveat and Paranoid Eggs

The only caveat I can offer is that placing all your data on one drive (and never backing up that drive) is truly the epitome of "putting all your eggs in one basket." While all my 70,000+ RAW and JPG photos, countless documents, PDFs, movies, and other files would fill the 1.82TB allocation quite rapidly, I would be remiss if I didn't act on a little data paranoia. Whatever goes on the 2TB drive also goes onto DVD or smaller hard drives that can be stuffed away in a storage unit somewhere. Should anything ever happen to the 2TB drive (glitch, fire, theft, etc.) I would be able to recoup from the loss. Both LaCie and Hitachi offer excellent products and they stand by them 100 percent. That's excellent, really, but it's up to the consumer to add an extra layer of data protection.

Because this 2TB drive uses two 1TB drives in RAID 0, there's an increased risk of trouble recovering data in the event that one of the two hard drives dies. RAID 1 is better for the über-paranoid, but until 2TB SATA drives are in production, twin 1TB drives in RAID 0 are the best (and only) option.

If you're considering the 2TB Big Disk Extreme+ as a single migration/storage point for several existing hard drives, do so, but wrap those old drives in static-free bags and store them somewhere safe, like in an underground bunker where even EMPs can't mess with your data.


Conclusion

The LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ 2TB external hard drive is hardcore gorgeous and very, very fast. With the holy trinity of data connections (USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800), there are very few consumers out there who couldn't benefit from such a massive external storage option.

Even though the $849 USD price tag may make budget shoppers feel a little woozy, professional users will concur that price and quality very often go hand in hand. Frankly, the $849 price is just barely over the average retail cost of the parts, and that represents an excellent value for consumers.


Pros:

• Huge 1.82TB usable space
• USB 2.0, Firewire 400, & Firewire 800
• Solid construction
• Nearly silent
• Energy efficient

Cons:

• Data rates slightly slower than suggested
• RAID 0 poses data recovery risk if an internal drive dies