A New 'Superdrive' Being Released from LaCie

By Charles Haine Guaranteeing storage stability is nearly impossible. No matter how many precautions are taken, there will always be the chance that a hard drive will crash possibly resulting in loss of media. LaCie is looking to ease that concern with their new 'Superdrive', the 6Big and 12Big drives. LaCie was looking to create a storage platform that if compromised media and data would still be intact. Various other companies generally guarantee their products but LaCie is putting a 5-year warranty including an immediate hard drive replacement service allowing filmmakers and anyone using this drive to continue working while LaCie addresses the issue.

The 6Big and 12Big drives are just that: big. They are housed in a single enclosure with either six or 12 drives inside that can be arrayed a variety of ways, with most filmmakers likely to choose RAID 6. If you've been around a while, you are likely familiar with RAID 0, where drives are striped together for speed, or RAID 1, where they are mirrors of each other (an easy way to remember is that RAID 1 gives you "1" backup, while RAID 0 gives you "0" backup). RAID 6 offers even higher redundancy while keeping up speed. Up to two of the six drives can fail with absolutely no loss of data.

This is a great start, but it gets way better with the five year warranty. Using IronWolf drives, LaCie feels confident enough to warranty not just the enclosure but also the drives inside for five years. To be clear, this doesn't mean you'll never lose data; if you try really hard you can manage to destroy data and that won't be LaCie's fault. What the warranty will do, however, is immediately ship you a replacement drive for the failed one. You keep working, the new drive comes, and you swap it out and mail the old drive back without losing a day.

Most independent filmmakers haven't had the budget for RAID devices until recently. With the 6Big and 12Big lines, LaCie is pushing into this area in a big way, and with the company's long experience working with filmmakers and creatives it's likely to be a successful product. A workflow that allows for both redundancy and speed—and that guarantees immediate drive replacement if your drive fails so you can just keep working—is an amazing setup....[continue reading]