I'm looking at purchasing a 300gb-ish LaCie firewire drive to expand the storage (and get better access times than the onboard 4200 RPM drive) on my 12" powerbook. My question is, what is the functional difference between the Big Disk and Big Disk Extreme? Both support Firewire 800 (my laptop only supports 400, but I'll probably be upgrading to a g5 or new intel-based apple desktop in the next couple of years, after I graduate), but the Big Disk Extreme claims "raid 0 out of the box" and costs about $60 more for a 20gb increase in storage. Does anybody have any experience with either of these devices? Right now, I'm probably going to be doing most of my capture off DV / DVCAM decks; we have no HD or even SD gear, but I'd like to keep my upgrade path open considering how HD looks ready to go mainstream in the not-so-distant future. Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Ryan Spicer

Some review sites state that the Big Disk Extreme is actually a striped raid0 array of two physical drives, but I have a hard time imagining two 3.5" drives fitting inside a case of that size. Can anyone confirm that this is actually the case?

I have had bad luck with the Big Disks.... I got my last one replaced with the Extreme and it seems much better...faster, more solid. It does get VERY VERY hot because of its fanless design that sends the heat to the aluminum case.


ash =o)