Lacie's new "Brick" harddrives do not look like your average external drive. Resembling Lego blocks, the drives can be stacked and they come in red, white and blue colors. The drives are available in desktop sizes of up to 500 GBytes in capacity. In addition, smaller bus-powered drives will be sold to laptop users.

The drive chassis isn't just painted red, white or blue, but is made of colored plastic. The interfaces and power button is in the back, while the front of the drive is featureless. The desktop version only comes with a USB 2.0 interface, but the mobile versions come in either USB 2.0 or dual USB 2.0 and FireWire. The available capacities of the desktop drives are 160, 250, 300 and 500 GByte. The mobile versions store up to 40, 80 and 120 GByte.

Lacie has been known to offer external harddrives in designer wrappings for a while. In 2004, the company introduced an external drive designed by F.A. Porsche. Last September, the company started selling an orange credit card-sized drive called Carte Orange.

Lacie said it is taking pre-orders for the Bricks on their website now and expects the drives to hit retail stores next month. Tom's Hardware Guide already has the drives in its lab and currently runs the devices through its test parcours.