-You want your extra hard drive to be fast, secure, offer a large amount of storage, and also quite easy to you.
Basically, you want everything.
Well, I have something here that's very close to that.
Hello, my name is Dong Ngo, and this is the LaCie 2big USB 3.0 external hard drive.
It's another product that is so cool it earns our Editor's Choice Award.
Now, this is the first desktop USB 3.0-based external hard drive that supported RAID configuration we tested.
The device has 2 bays to support 2 SATA hard drives.
These hard drives are easily accessible from the back.
You just need a coin to open the lock, pull the latch, and there you go, the drive is now out for you to remove, change, or just take a look.
The 2big supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 configuration.
In more friendly terms, let's say you call this fast and safe, respectively, which also mean the benefit of each
setup.
A part from that is also support for non-RAID setup called JBOD.
Now, to pick what type of configuration you want the hard drive to be setup in, you just need to move the slider here to the respective position.
After that, you use a pin to press on this reset/confirm button, and the drive would take care of the job.
Note that changing from one setup to another will erase all the information stored on the drive.
As you can see, the 2big is actually really big and heavy, too.
This is because its aluminum chassis is also designed
to work as a heat sink to spare the device from having a fan.
This design works well and the drive is actually very quiet in our test.
It's also very fast, too, both with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0.
On the front, the 2big has a large blue button that works both as a status light and the power switch.
When idle for a long time, the 2big will turn this light, as well as the hard drive off, to conserve energy.
During this time, however, the partition is still available to the computer.
At around $330 for 2 terabytes or $550 for 4 terabytes, the 2big is slightly more expensive than other similarly configured drives.
However, we found it worth the investment especially considering the fact that it comes with a PCI Express USB 3.0 add-in card for desktop computers.
For more information, you can check out the in-depth review at CNET.com.
Once again, my name is Dong Ngo,
and this has been the first look at the LaCie 2big USB 3.0 external hard drive.
