Product Reviews

Although the terabyte barrier is an arbitrary one, it's an exciting measure of how far things have progressed that 1,000,000MB will now fit into a device about half the size of a shoebox. Take a copy of PC Pro from 1999 and you'll see that the average size of a hard disk was about 18GB. While you can't get more than 300GB in a single internal hard disk just yet, LaCie has produced the next best thing in the form of the 1TB Bigger Disk.

The drive doesn't break with the familiar look of LaCie external devices, although it's physically bigger than most. The back panel sports two FireWire 800 connectors, as well as FireWire 400 and USB 2, with cables supplied for each interface, plus a 6-pin to 4-pin adaptor cable. To protect your investment there's a slot for a Kensington lock too.

Peeping inside our review unit we found four Maxtor MaXLine Plus II hard disks; these are Maxtor's enterprise-level IDE units, above the more familiar DiamondMax range in terms of reliability but still running at 7,200rpm and sporting 8MB cache. The Bigger Disk isn't just four drives cobbled together in a box either; there's a major amount of additional electronics in there to allow the four to appear as a single volume in Windows.

The four fast drives munch through plenty of power; the casing gets very warm after a while, despite the rear-mounted fan and front air intake. Thankfully, the power switch has three positions: on, off and automatic,

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the latter of which powers up the drives only when one of the interfaces is connected to a host computer. If you're one of those who don't believe in letting drives power down, you can leave it on all the time; if you're more concerned about power consumption, put the switch on auto and they'll only be spinning when there's a need for them. When it does power up, soft-start circuitry spins up each disk sequentially over about 15 seconds to minimise the strain on the external mains power supply.

A point to bear in mind is that once the fan and all the drives are spinning, the Bigger Disk is pretty loud; if you're considering using it in a design studio you may want to take advantage of FireWire 800's maximum 100m cable length and position the disk as far awayÊas possible.

The Bigger Disk is supplied formatted to Mac OS HFS+ format; hook it up to Windows XP and it needs initialising in the Local Storage Management administration tool. Formatting to NTFS with the default cluster size of 4,096 bytes leads to a single logical volume appearing in Windows Explorer, with a formatted capacity of 935GB.

Performance was impressive, particularly over the FireWire 800 interface. Running iometer (www.iometer.org) configured to 1MB sequential read/write operations, sustained throughput averaged 44MB/sec; over FireWire 400 this dropped to 33MB/sec. Hooking up via USB 2 brought it down further, to 26MB/sec. Performing random I/O made the difference less noticeable: small, non-sequential 64KB transactions gave 13, 12 and 11MB/sec over FireWire 800, 400 and USB 2 respectively.

The Bigger Disk certainly isn't the cheapest way to 1TB of storage, being around 30 per cent more expensive than four bare 250GB MaXLine drives, but it's certainly one of the most convenient. And with the excellent performance over FireWire 800, there's no speed penalty compared to internal drives. If you need this quantity of storage and you just want to be able to plug it in and get going, the Bigger Disk is the answer to your problems.