Seagate, LaCie Show Off Super-Slim, Flashy Drives

Seagate and LaCie have released a selection of new drives that definitely aren’t the basic commodity drives you’ve relied on in the past. Some are flashy, some are thin, while others are wireless and supplement the storage on your mobile devices.

The Seagate Seven is one of the thinnest external portable 2.5-inch hard drives out there. It’s barely larger than the upgrade drives you’ve popped into your laptop, but this one is a USB 3.0 external drive rather than a SATA connected internal drive. The steel enclosure is molded to look like an internal drive, an aesthetic choice meant to appeal to IT guys and anyone who is familiar working on PC internal components. The 500GB drive is rugged enough to be an everyday carry, but is slim enough to fit in most pockets or commuter bags. The Seagate Seven will be available in mid to late January for $99.99.

The LaCie Mirror has a lot of flash, but this time we’re not talking solid state memory. The 1TB traditional hard drive comes in a svelte, mirrored Corning Gorilla Glass 3 case designed by Pauline Deltour, with a matching Makassar ebony wood stand. The wood stand has a penholder carved in its surface, and LaCie claims that no two will be identical, due to the natural wood grain. The glass is damage- and scratch-resistant, but we have a feeling that most of these drives will stay put on their owners’ desks. The 1TB Mirror drive will be available in late January for $279.99.

Seagate is no stranger to the portable media drive category, and its latest entry is the Seagate Wireless drive, a 500GB drive with Wi-Fi access for your portable devices. Through the Seagate Media apps, you can access photo, video, and other files on your Android, iOS, and Kindle Fire devices, Windows 8 PCs, and Windows RT tablets. You can also access the drive via a Web browser on Mac and Windows laptops.

The new drives look more like supplemental battery chargers than hard drives, and they come in a range of colors including lime green (above), cool blue, slate grey, fire-engine red. and white. You can store up to 200 HD movies on the drive and stream them to three connected devices simultaneously; the drive has Internet pass-through for home and hotspot users. The drive also supports streaming to Apple AirPlay, Google Chromecast, Roku, and LG and Samsung smart TVs. The Seagate Wireless will be available in early February for $129.99 (500GB).

Seagate’s Personal Cloud home media storage takes the same idea, and supersizes it for the home. It’s a home NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive that works with all the same devices as the Seagate Wireless, except it runs on your home’s Wi-Fi or wired router. In addition to using media at home on the drive through the Seagate Media app, signing up for a free Seagate Access account lets you stream media on the road from the drive sitting at home. Two-way communication is possible, so you can back up your media like pictures and video to your home storage, or to cloud-based storage like Amazon S3, Box, Baidu, Dropbox, Google Drive, HiDrive, and Yandex.Disk.

The Personal Cloud will be available in one-drive bay models (3TB, 4TB, and 5TB), or in two-drive bay models (4TB, 6TB, and 8TB). The two-drive bay models can be set for either maximum storage, or duplicate storage (like a RAID 1 array) so if either drive fails, your data is still safe. Pricing is pending, but look for the Personal Cloud drives later this month.

Last, but not least, the LaCie Rugged RAID is a compact, rugged RAID array built into a portable drive chassis. It looks very much like the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt (500GB SSD) with which it shares a chassis. This time, it has two internal hard drives for a total of up to 4TB of RAID 0 storage. You can configure the drive for 2TB of protected RAID 1 storage as well. The captive Thunderbolt cable can’t be lost, and the drive comes with a USB 3.0 cable for compatibility with most Macs and PCs. It has the usual 1.5-meter drop protection and dust and water splash resistance. Look for the LaCie Rugged RAID later in Q1 2015, with a price of $449.99 for 4TB.