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• LaCie’s Little Big Disk Quadra is a controversial product. First of all, we have to point out the price of $599.99, which deserves being called “excessive” in the light of current hard drive prices, which have reached $100 for a 500 GB 2.5” mobile unit. That heavy price will get you the Little Big Disk Quadra, which comes in an enclosure that was designed by Neil Poulton. You get eSATA, USB 2.0, and both types of FireWire interfaces, as well as the option to run the device powered by the FireWire interface. Unfortunately, neither eSATA nor USB 2.0 can do this—USB 2.0 can’t supply sufficient power, and power over eSATA has not been specified. LaCie adds a small power supply for USB and eSATA users, though, and you’d need an external supply for any other storage device that offers 1 TB of storage as well. Terabyte Capacity Thanks to RAID 0 The terabyte capacity can be achieved by operating the two drives in RAID 0 striping mode, which results in considerably increased read and write throughput when compared to a single hard drive. The result is convincing: almost 100 MB/s of read and write throughput, and a minimum of at least 70 MB/s is not bad, although solid RAID 0 setups using two modern 2.5” drives could probably yield even better throughput. Using FireWire 800 will give you more than 65 MB/s read and 51 MB/s constant write throughput, while USB 2.0 is limited to 33 MB/s reads and 27 MB/s writes. We found that the device supports only RAID 0; a secure RAID 1 array cannot be configured. Impressive Build Quality and Power Consumption The aluminum case, with its hard drives built in, is certainly a heavyweight at 645 g (1.4 lbs), but again, we have to compare that to other 1 TB 3.5” solutions, which won’t be lighter. And the enclosure is amazingly well built and makes a solid impression. The rear side includes all of the interfaces, such as eSATA, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, while the front holds the huge, blue status LED and backup button. We also liked the power consumption figures: a 4 W idle power requirement and peak power consumption of 7 W is really amazing, considering that it is necessary to power two 2.5” hard drives, the RAID logic and the power supply. Unfortunately, LaCie did not include a physical power switch, which forces users to disconnect the power supply if they want to completely shut down the Little Big Disk. LaCie Software LaCie bundles a backup solution with its product, which is nice, but does not particularly add value. It is essentially a copy utility that creates new backups by creating a new folder. Folders are named by the name of the backup paired with an index, and backups are always complete—it’s not possible to make incremental backups, nor to schedule them. The only option is an automated execution of the backup tool at the time Windows starts, which will automatically trigger a backup run.

• We used a 32 GB flash drive to test the storage accessories because we wanted to determine possible bottlenecks, and because the rather low capacity is great for finishing storage benchmarks quickly. System HardwareProcessor(s)2 x Intel Xeon Processor (Nocona core)3.6 GHz, FSB800, 1 MB L2 CachePlatformAsus NCL-DS (Socket 604) Intel E7520 Chipset, BIOS 1005RAMCorsair CM72DD512AR-400 (DDR2-400 ECC, reg.)2 x 512 MB, CL3-3-3-10 TimingsSystem Hard DriveWestern Digital Caviar WD1200JBTest Hard Drive ISeagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3500641 500 GB, 7,200 RPM, 16 MB Cache, SATA/300Test Hard Drive IISamsung 64 GB SATA-II Flash SSD, SATA/300Test Hard Drive IIIMtron Pro 7500 32 GB SLC Flash SSD, SATA/300Mass Storage Controller(s)Intel 82801EB UltraATA/100 Controller (ICH5)Promise SATA 300TX4 Driver 1.0.0.33NetworkingBroadcom BCM5721 On-Board Gigabit Ethernet NICGraphics CardOn-Board Graphics ATI RageXL, 8 MB System HardwarePerformance Measurementsc't h2benchw 3.6 PCMark05 V1.01I/O PerformanceIOMeter 2003.05.10File server-Benchmark, Web server-Benchmark, Database-Benchmark, Workstation-Benchmark System Software&DriversOSMicrosoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Service Pack 1Platform DriverIntel Chipset Installation Utility 7.0.0.1025Graphics DriverDefault Windows Graphics Driver Fujitsu MBA3174RC Samsung 64 GB SATA-II Flash SSD  Mtron Pro 7500 Results: Access Time We first listed the individual hard drives and their performance levels, followed by the storage accessories we tried. Samsung’s 32 GB SLC flash SSD was used to test the Crucial SK01 kit, while we used an Mtron Pro 7500 3.5” SSD with the iStarUSA and Unitek devices. Access time is several times longer via USB 2.0 when compared to eSATA, both for Crucial’s and iStarUSA’s devices. Still, we’re looking at excellent performance that cannot be considered an issue. eSATA is clearly faster, but USB 2.0 doesn’t slow down access time by too much.

• The introduction of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), was an important step in increasing hard drive capacities above 1000 GB. The first terabyte drive, Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000, was based on a massive five platters, as it had not used PMR. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 was based on four platters despite using PMR. Samsung’s Spinpoint F1 at 1 TB capacity came a bit later, and was the first performance terabyte hard drive to deliver its massive capacity on only three platters, making it more efficient and faster as well. It also delivered a business advantage to Samsung, because the so-called sweet spot—which typically means how much data can be held on a single platter hard drive—could be moved to 250 GB to 320 GB thanks to the much increased data density. Still today, low-cost sweet spot storage is the key to volume hard drive sales.Speed Up, Speed DownA result of increased data density is improved throughput, as the heads can read or write more data for given physical parameters, such as spindle speed and drive form factor. Consequently, hard drives have managed to increase peak throughput from approximately 80 MB/s in 2007 to more than 120 MB/s in 2009. These would be the figures in apples to apples comparisons of 7,200 RPM drives. However, since efficiency is at least as important as high performance, rotation speeds of mainstream hard drives are decreasing: Seagate’s Barracuda LP runs at 5,900 RPM, and the WD Caviar Green and Samsung EcoGreen products at 5,400 RPM. All of them deliver high capacity storage with much increased performance. As you will see in our comparison of Samsung’s hard drive evolution, the performance penalty due to the spindle speed reduction from 7,200 to 5,400 RPM is very acceptable: 3.5” power efficient hard drives still reach 110 MB/s today (as on the Samsung Spinpoint F2 EcoGreen).Trend: Mobile Storage, Performance Storage, Capacity StorageThe market clearly is going into different directions. Netbooks require cheap, reliable, affordable and quick hard drives: these typically are 2.5” hard drives with one platter and a 160 GB capacity. Notebooks should offer more storage, hence 5,400 RPM 2.5” notebook hard drives with up to 250 GB on a single platter represent the mainstream. Prosumer devices are based on twin-platter drives of up to 500 GB total capacity. High-end notebooks run on flash SSDs or on 7,200 RPM notebook drives.Desktop systems will increasingly be equipped with two types of storage: your system should be running on a performance storage solution. This could be a fast flash SSD or a RAID configuration of two or more hard drives. Individual performance drives, such as modern 7,200 RPM drives, will deliver sufficient performance for anyone in the mainstream or enthusiast segments. While system storage should deliver maximum performance, it does not have to provide lots of capacity. This can be taken care of by capacity storage hard drives, which are in many cases being relocated outside of the PC enclosure.Take Out the DriveOnly a few years ago, increasing your storage capacity would have meant purchasing an additional hard drive and installing it into your PC. Today’s approach is more convenient: retail external storage kits are available from all important storage companies, and they offer up to 2 TB of storage in stylish enclosures, connected via USB 2.0, or preferably via fast eSATA links. Anyone who remotely cares about PC internals clearly should focus on a quick system storage solution plus additional storage, which will mostly be based on external 3.5” hard drives.