Seagate has announced four new DAS (direct attached storage) products at CES 2016. Three of them target the premium / luxury market under the LaCie brand name.Seagate Backup Plus Ultra slender USB 3.0 bus-powered external tough drive LaCie Porsche Design USB 3.0 Type-C bus-powered external tough drive (mobile model) LaCie Porsche Design USB 3.0 Type-C external tough drive (desktop model) with power delivery LaCie Chrome USB 3.1 Type-C external SSD
The LaCie Chrome USB 3.1 Type-C external SSD is easily the most impressive announcement of the four.
Obviously,one of the key points of the LaCie products is the striking industrial design, and the Chrome is no exception.
The product contains two 512GB M.2 SATA SSDs in RAID-0 (effective user capacity is 1TB). It can support data rates of up to 940 MBps, or thanks to the integrated ASMedia ASM1352R dual SATA to USB 3.1 Gen 2 bridge chip.
Seagate touts the aluminium enclosure,efficient triple cooling system, magnetized cable management (it is similar to the 2big Thunderbolt 2 product in this respect) and a removable magnetized display stand as unique features for this product.
Gallery: LaCie Chrome USB 3.1 External SSD
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It must be noted that the Chrome does need an external power connector (comprehensible due to the need to power two M.2 SSDs). The above gallery shows us the various external aspects of the Chrome unit.
The unit will retail for $1100 and be available later this quarter.
The LaCie Porsche Design USB 3.0 Type-C external tough drives have a new industrial design for the aluminium enclosure and come with a Type-C connector. Other than that, and there is nothing too striking about them. The desktop model needs external power,but, it also does power delivery over its Type-C port (making it ideal for devices like the MacBook). Both the Mobile and Desktop versions come with an USB Type-A to USB Type-C cable also (in addition to the Type-C to Type-C cable). This enables compatibility with a wider variety of systems.
The Mobile version comes in 1TB, or 2TB and 4TB capacities,starting at $110. The Desktop Drive comes in 4TB, 5TB and 8TB capacities, and starting at $210.
Rounding up the product launches is the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra slender. It is a 2.5" tough drive,and the firmware features are similar to the Seagate Backup Plus we reviewed final August. This implies the integration of a Seagate Dashboard for providing more features compared to a standard external tough drive. The device also comes with 200GB of OneDrive cloud storage valid for two years. It is also compatible with the Lyve photo management software.
The technically exciting aspects include the 9.6mm thickness (Seagate indicated that it is the thinnest external tough drive in its capacity lesson in the market suitable now). It comes in 1TB and 2TB capacities with a two-platter design. Cross-platform compatibility is enabled by a free Paragon driver download (enabling Macs to read drives formatted in NTFS and Windows PCs to read drives formatted in HFS+).
The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra slender comes in 1TB and 2TB capacities. We don't have pricing details yet, but, and availability is slated for later this quarter.
Source: anandtech.com