LaCie dresses up its new hard drives

LaCie unveiled a whole passel of new hard drives at this year's CES. True to form, LaCie's drives aren't your grandpa's hard drives, all clunky and generic-looking. Form and function are equally important to this Mac-centric company (did you see their Lego-influenced Brick Hard Drives last year?). For example, the new LaCie Skwarim, designed by Karim Rashid, come in bright, eye-catching colors (pink for the 30GB and blue for the 60GB) and have a fun texture that makes it hard to keep your hands off of them.

The new LaCie Rugged Hard Drive boasts a metal casing hugged by a shock-resistant rubber belt (in bright orange). While you can't toss it out of a moving car and expect it to stay in one piece, it can likely survive a spill off your desk. It's bus powered and plug-and-play. The USB 2.0-only version comes in 80GB and 120GB capacities, and the triple-interface version (USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 and 800) comes in 80GB, 100GB, and 120GB capacities.

The LaCie Little Big Disk crams a whole lotta storage in an impressively small, industrial-looking drive. It's another triple-interface drive and is powered via the FireWire bus. Built-in RAID 0, a 16MB cache, and a 7,200rpm disk make this drive a little powerhouse.

Finally, The LaCie Two Big drive is a good solution for people for whom the Biggest F800 is too big. Sporting two hot-swappable SATA II drives (500GB or 1TB total storage space) and RAID 0 and RAID 1 security, it's a good stepping-stone between the standard external drive and the gargantuan Biggest F800.