Seagate Updates DAS Portfolio at CES 2016

Seagate has announced four new DAS (direct attached storage) products at CES 2016. Three of them target the premium / luxury market under the LaCie brand name.

• Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim USB 3.0 bus-powered external hard drive
• LaCie Porsche Design USB 3.0 Type-C bus-powered external hard drive (mobile model)
• LaCie Porsche Design USB 3.0 Type-C external hard drive (desktop model) with power delivery
• LaCie Chrome USB 3.1 Type-C external SSD

The LaCie Chrome USB 3.1 Type-C external SSD is easily the most impressive announcement of the four.
Obviously, one of the key points of the LaCie products is the striking industrial design, and the Chrome is no exception.

The product contains two 512GB M.2 SATA SSDs in RAID-0 (effective user capacity is 1TB). It can support data rates of up to 940 MBps, thanks to the integrated ASMedia ASM1352R dual SATA to USB 3.1 Gen 2 bridge chip.

Seagate touts the aluminium enclosure, efficient triple cooling system, magnetized cable management (it is similar to the 2big Thunderbolt 2 product in this respect) and a removable magnetized display stand as unique features for this product.

It must be noted that the Chrome does need an external power connector (understandable due to the need to power two M.2 SSDs). The above gallery shows us the various external aspects of the Chrome unit.
The unit will retail for $1100 and be available later this quarter.

The LaCie Porsche Design USB 3.0 Type-C external hard drives have a new industrial design for the aluminium enclosure and come with a Type-C connector. Other than that, there is nothing too striking about them. The desktop model needs external power, but, it also does power delivery over its Type-C port (making it ideal for devices like the MacBook). Both the Mobile and Desktop versions come with an USB Type-A to USB Type-C cable also (in addition to the Type-C to Type-C cable). This enables compatibility with a wider variety of systems.

The Mobile version comes in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities, starting at $110. The Desktop Drive comes in 4TB, 5TB and 8TB capacities, starting at $210.

Rounding up the product launches is the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim. It is a 2.5" hard drive, and the firmware features are similar to the Seagate Backup Plus we reviewed last August. This implies the integration of a Seagate Dashboard for providing more features compared to a standard external hard drive. The device also comes with 200GB of OneDrive cloud storage valid for two years. It is also compatible with the Lyve photo management software.

The technically interesting aspects include the 9.6mm thickness (Seagate indicated that it is the thinnest external hard drive in its capacity class in the market right now). It comes in 1TB and 2TB capacities with a two-platter design. Cross-platform compatibility is enabled by a free Paragon driver download (enabling Macs to read drives formatted in NTFS and Windows PCs to read drives formatted in HFS+).

The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim comes in 1TB and 2TB capacities. We don't have pricing details yet, but, availability is slated for later this quarter.