LaCie yesterday (10th April 2008) announced wins for their external hard disk design in the Red Dot design awards.

The awards are entered by manufacturers of industrially designed products the world over and judged by an international panel of design experts.

In total LaCie received four awards;

• The LaCie 2big family designed by Niel Poulton
• The LaCie Little Disk family by Sam Hecht
• The Hard Disk designed by Neil Poulton
• The LaCie Golden Disk designed by Ora-Ïto

Some of these devices are certainly aesthetically pleasing, however, this is no measure of the reliabilty of the hard disk inside the enclosure.

LaCie devices of the past have contained cheap drives and been prone to failure, we can only hope that the latest itterations of the LaCie external hard drive products are more resilient to drive failure.

It is important to remember if using one of these hard drives, that, as with all hard drives (regardless of manufacturer or reliabilty ratings), they WILL fail at some point. If you have critical data that you cannot afford to lose we recommend that you keep as many copies on as many types of media as feasible or practical.

abc Data Recovery Ltd offer services to help you to recover data from failed LaCie external drives and NAS devices.