Product Reviews

LaCie's oddly named 2Big Triple external hard disk uses two 750GB disks and supports RAID 0 and 1. In RAID 0 mode the two disks are used together, providing 1.5TB of storage, but if one disk should fail then you'll lose all your data. In RAID 1 mode the contents of one disk are mirrored on the other, so all your data will be safe if a disk fails but only 750GB of storage can

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be used.

Both disks are mounted in removable trays, although some force is required to extract them. A useful extra is the status light, which doubles as a button that can launch the bundled Retrospect backup program, or alternatively your own favourite backup utility.

In addition to USB, there are also FireWire 400 and 800 ports, hence the Triple name. There aren't any eSATA ports, however, which is a shame since eSATA is faster and more common than FireWire 800 on new PCs.

When configured as either a RAID 0 or 1 array, the 2Big generally performed well in our file-transfer tests no matter which interface we used, although it wasn't quite as fast as we expected when copying small files over USB and FireWire 400.

We were impressed with the 2Big's RAID support and performance, especially as it costs a surprisingly reasonable 19p per gigabyte. The 2Big may not be cheap, but it's the best RAID-capable external hard disk we've seen.