The TeraByte Drives Redefine External Storage

LaCie Big Disk Extreme 1 TB

The Big Disk Extreme is the dual drive model of the LaCie d2 series. All drives come in a nice aluminum case and offer either USB 2.0, Serial ATA or USB 2.0 with Firewire 400 & 800. The latter models are called Extreme with Triple Interface.

There are two Big Disk Extreme drives available, the regular one with USB 2.0 only, and the triple interface variant that has the additional Firewire ports. Yet there is another difference: While the storage area of the regular version spans across both hard drives (using JBOD), the Big Disk Extreme with Triple Interface is actually based on a RAID 0. As a result, it offers excellent performance when attached via Firewire/1394b at 800 MBit/s. However, this comes at the price of exposing your data to increased risk: Should either of these two drives fail, all of the data will be lost. From this point of view it's a pity that the user does not get the option to select whether to run a fast RAID 0 or a more secure JBOD setup.

LaCie provides a full set of cables for USB 2.0, Firewire 1394a and Firewire 1394b (for 800 MBit/s transfers). There is no manual, but a compact quick start guide booklet is included that will help beginners to get going.