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LaCie's New Gold-Covered External Drive

by Tim Stevens on September 13, 2007 at 11:17 AM

An External Hard Drive That's All Gold

External hard drives -- those boxes that connect to your PC and store all your excess music, video, and other files -- are usually ugly, or, at best, boring-looking. And though these babies seem boring as devices go in our iPhone-obsessed world, they serve an important purpose.

Increasingly, they're also as much a part of the furniture as our computers are. So it's about time that the manufacturers of these devices started investing in a little design. Seagate last year launched a series of sleek and fashion-forward FreeAgent external drives, for example. We applaud these design initiatives, but we're a little perplexed with LaCie's latest external drive, which is a bit garish. The 500-gigabyte (GB) device is gold-plated, or at least coated with a golden substance that contains a "small percentage of gold metal content," and delivers a shape that looks like molten gold -- assuming molten gold ever took the shape of a box with some waves on top.

It's shape and color were created by Ora-Ïto, a consumer-focused French designer whose work seems to focus on things like artsy-shaped perfume bottles and the aluminum Heineken bottle. His work here on the $189 drive is a little less organic and a bit more de trop, as the French say, but it at least delivers where it counts. Bottom line? This is a designer peripheral thing holds a 500-gigabyte hard disk and stays cool enough to not require a noisy fan.

So, while your drive may look awfully loud, at least it won't sound loud.

From Engadget

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Tags: Design, Gold, Hard Drive, HardDrive, LaCie

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