Posted on Monday, January 21 2008 @ 10:30 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
LaCie unveiled two new USB products which use Samsung's 1.3" 30GB and 40GB hard drives: there's the Little Disk and the credit-card sized USB Key Max.
The Samsung 1.3-inch drive was designed to be the most efficient use of capacity per volume, while its size is equal to that of Compact Flash II cards. The development of such technology allowed LaCie to overcome current size limitations and to achieve innovative design with massive storage capacities for pocket-sized devices.
“The development of these small products was enabled due to Samsung’s new 1.3-inch technology that offers a small footprint with vast capacity improvement,” said Nolwenn Rozen, LaCie Mobile Product Manager. “By using this technology in these new mobile offerings, LaCie was able to see an increase in maximum capacity from 12GB to 40GB.”
“In the early 2000s, other hard drive vendors introduced 1-inch drives, and due to low demand, couldn’t gain traction in the mobile application market,” said TJ Lee, Samsung VP, sales and marketing team in Storage System Division. “However, in step with the surging growth of multimedia contents and the rapidly changing mobile environment, Samsung chose to design 1.3-inch as a new form factor, which has been very successful in mass production. Samsung is pleased to see LaCie embrace this new technology in these new products.”
With easy plug-and-play installation, the 1.3-inch Little Disk and USB Key Max could not be any simpler to use. The devices are driver-free and are compatible with any computer running Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X 10.2 or higher or Linux 2.4 or 2.6. The devices are preformatted FAT32 for cross platform versatility.
The devices come preloaded with LaCie’s ‘1-Click’ Backup Software for PC and Mac and SilverKeeper Backup Software for Mac to regularly back up data. Also bundled for Windows is LaCieSync synchronization and encryption software that syncs updated files, emails, or personal settings to your office or home computer. For added security AES 128-bit encryption keep data safe from unwanted eyes.
Compared to USB memory sticks that use NAND flash memory these two products are priced very competitively. Both the 1.3-inch Little Disk and the USB Key Max are available now starting at $119.99 and $109.99, respectively.
