April 28, 2008 LaCie has pushed mobile capacity to 500GB for its Neil Poulton designed Rugged Hard Disk. The LaCie Rugged features a unique scratch-resistant aluminum shell and a shock-resistant rubber bumper to protect data against the everyday bumps, bruises and hard knocks. Utilizing a Hitachi Travelstar 5K500, 2.5-inch internal hard disk, LaCie was able to produce a product nearly identical in size to its previous Rugged offerings.

The disk is available in a USB 2.0 or a triple interface USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 version, which gives maximum data transfer speeds of up to 800Mbits/s. It's bus-powered by either USB or FireWire connection and both rugged versions come preloaded with LaCie Setup Assistant, a proprietary utility that formats the drive according to your needs (Mac, Windows, or cross-platform environments) and automatically copies the user manual and utilities to the computer. The utilities provided include LaCie ‘1-Click’ Backup Software for both PC and Mac and SilverKeeper for Mac.

The LaCie Rugged 500GB version is available at USD$339.99 for the Hi-Speed USB 2.0 model and USD$399.99 for the triple interface model.

For further info visit LaCie.