The 2010 Videomaker Best Product of the Year award for Best Hard Drive goes to the LaCie 4Big Quadra.

LaCie’s 4Big Quadra comes in a sleek aluminium shell that complements any desktop beautifully. Beyond the 4Big Quadra’s aesthetics the unit performs well – really well – in fact it is so fast it maxed out USB, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 during our tests. The bottom line is there are not many storage devices available with all of the interface types, built-in RAID, and fast throughput that the LaCie 4Big Quadra offers. If you’re in the market for another hard drive you can’t go wrong with one of LaCie’s drives.

Read Videomaker‘s review of the LaCie 4Big Quadra .

Other World Computing (OWC(r)) http://www.macsales.com, a leading PC and Mac technology company, announced today lower pricing of up to $300 and a new 0TB “Add Your Own Drives” Kit for the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 desktop hardware RAID storage line. Featuring Hardware RAID 5 redundancy to protect against data loss, the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 has four SATA hard drive bays for up to 8TB of storage; a “Quad Interface” of FireWire(r) 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and eSATA ports for Mac and PC compatibility; and data transfer speeds of up to 300MB/s. With this combination of features, the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 offers the highest level of data capacity, performance, and reliability in a Plug and Play desktop ha rdware RAID solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Over at the Life Zero Blog, John gives you a great breakdown on how to build a relatively inexpensive 4TB RAID system that offers pretty spectacular performance from off the shelf parts. It uses a ProAvio Editbox 8ML, (We’re currently working on a review of the newer EB8MS model for the magazine) as its RAID case.

It’s an interesting and informative read that takes you through the alphabet soup of hard drive related acronyms, and spells out exactly what you need to do to get your own system up and running.

As a guy who used to build his own computer systems himself (before it became cheaper just to buy your computer off the shelf), its nice to see that with a little research and a screwdriver you can still get a deal on good hardware by applying a little DIY to the task.