Seagate and LaCie debut new external, wireless drives

By Matthew S. Smith January 5, 2014

seagate lacie debut new external wireless drives backup plus slim hi res image family — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Do you need a lot of external storage, and need it to be portable? Seagate may have the drive for you. The company’s new Backup Plus FAST crams 4TB of storage into a tiny, pocket-able form factor. It also comes packing an updated version of Seagate’s dashboard software, which helps users backup data from mobile devices, send files over Wi-Fi, and connect to cloud storage providers.

Seagate is making advances in internal storage, as well, where it’s debuting a new 500GB mechanical drive that’s only five millimeters thick. That means it’s thin enough to fit comfortably in the thinnest ultrabooks and some tablets. The drive will appear in the Lenovo Yoga 2 and will also be demoed in the upcoming Haier Sailing P13A tablet PC.

Aside from drives, Seagate is also expanding its services by increasing the availability of its Seagate Rescue data protection plan. The service will now be available through Staples in the United States and NCIX in Canada.

LaCie, which is owned by Seagate, has also made several announcements. Perhaps the most interesting is the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt, which the company claims is the fastest portable hard drive on the market. The drive delivers speeds up to ten times faster than USB 3.0 by relying on Thunderbolt 2.

Also announced is the Sphere, an unusual collaboration between LaCie and flatware maker Christofle. The resulting product is a spherical external hard disk called, appropriately, the Sphere. It offers one terabyte of storage is intended for consumers who want an attractive external drive to accompany an expensive all-in-one.

LaCie Fuel_image (with iPad) — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The final product announced by the company is Fuel, a one terabyte drive designed with the iPad in mind that can be accessed wirelessly via an app. This makes it possible for users to stream video to an iPad, Mac, Apple TV or other device. A single Fuel can share data with up to five devices at a time.

Exact release dates and pricing for all of these products have not been announced.

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Matthew S. Smith

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Matthew S. Smith is the former Lead Editor, Reviews at Digital Trends. He previously guided the Products Team, which dives…

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