Reprinted from a LaCie press release:
MACWORLD NEW YORK CITY (July 18, 2001) LaCie reinforced its lead in the mobile storage market today with two major announcements on its highly successful PocketDrive line. By combining the new FireWire-to-IDE bridge developed by LaCie with high-performance ATA 66 disks, the 10GB, 20GB and 30GB PocketDrives now provide transfer rates of up to 35MB/stwice as fast as traditional FireWire disks. The new 48GB PocketDrive, which is making its debut at LaCie’s Macworld Booth #1913 this week, will also achieve transfer rates of up to 35MB/s.
Measuring only 3.5″ x 5.75 x 1″ and weighing less than a pound, LaCie’s PocketDrives provide Gigabytes of capacity in an exceptionally small form factor. The new 48GB PocketDrive can store more than 20 hours of MPEG-2 video, more than 70 hours of CD-quality audio or a stack of text documents more than half-a-mile high.
Offering a combination of high capacities, mobility and convenience, the LaCie PocketDrives have quickly become very popular among content developers, illustrators, audio/video professionals and people on-the-go. With both Universal Serial Bus (USB) and FireWire (IEEE 1394) support, or “U&I” (LaCie’s acronym and trademark for the dual-support capability), the versatile drives provide users with an easy means of expanding the storage capacity of USB-equipped computers such as Apple iMacs, and iBooks; and FireWire systems such as the Macintosh G4 workstations and G4 Cubes, PowerBooks and the iMacDV systems.
The FireWire and USB buses make the LaCie PocketDrives hot-pluggable–they mount automatically as soon as they are connected and can be removed or swapped without having to shutdown or reboot the system.
In addition, because the PocketDrive is compatible with all FireWire or USB-equipped machines, users can quickly share the contents of the entire drive with others–regardless of their operating system. The capacity and performance of LaCie’s pocket-sized hard drives also make them ideal for full backups of an internal drive, including a bootable operating system.
Available now through LaCie authorized resellers and mail order partners, the LaCie PocketDrives have SRPs (after the $30 mail-in rebates) of $249 for the 10GB hard drive, $349 for the 20GB drive, $449 for the 30GB drive and $849 for the 48GB drive. In addition to the USB and FireWire cables, the drives include a small international power supply adapter for worldwide use, and LaCie’s Silverlining Pro drive management software. Silverlining Pro is the most comprehensive drive management software on the market and the only driver able to manage USB, IDE, SCSI and FireWire peripherals at the same time.
