LaCie 500GB Brick
Decided that living amongst huge piles of stuff probably isn’t the way forward. Stuff is good, and all that, but things are untify, and they need dusting. CD’s are mostly ugly, little plasticy things, nowhere near as enciting and evocative as vinyl. So what to do? well - back up all my music cds on a single hard drive for a start.
But what hard drive? there are countless wireless networkable media stations. Problem? they look like really quite ugly computer hardware. This ‘thing’ has to live in the living room.
Fortunately for me, LaCie asked Ora-Ïto to design a HDD, and they came up with the “Brick” - a hard disk which looks like an oversized lego brick. That’s a bright red, 500GB lego brick. The combination of over-powered hardware in toy-like housing just tickles me - 500GB? That’s roughly 125000 songs, or perhaps two Godspeedyou Black Emperor albums.
Plugged it in to the iBook G4 - and it just appears - exactly like any other HD, transfering files seemed reasonably quick, about the same speed as a usb thumbdrive. It does vibrate a little as the disk spins, and having it on a desk whilst hands were resting on a keyboard it was noticable. Not shown in the photograph is that it’s not USB powered and that it needs an external plug - there are probably sound engineering reasons for not having a motor-driven hard-drive running off of USB power but it does rather spoil the aesthetic, having a large power converter hanging off the back (it comes with its own UK and Europe plug - which is nice). It is fanless and almost silent - so perfect for media storage and playback.
And of course, bright red kinda goes with the bright red Smeg fridge and the Pro-Ject lemon yellow turntable.
