Today LaCie announced the Rugged RAID mobile drive featuring user selectable RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration.  The new drive featuring Seagate hard drives will be available later this quarter.

The Rugged RAID mobile drive is a drive featuring two hard drives that can be put in RAID 0 for speed or RAID 1 for data redundancy.  RAID 0 uses two drives to store one piece of data, allowing it to read and write faster by storing half of it on both drives to form the single piece of data.  RAID 0 is much faster than a single hard drive (by about 2x) while being less secure for data since if one drive goes then the data is gone.  On the other hand RAID 1 stores the same data on two hard drives so that if one of them were to ever fail you will still have the data on the other.  This is a much more secure way to store sensitive data that is important for a user to protect.

The Rugged is exactly what it is called, rugged and that is thanks to its design.  The drive is resistant to shock, with it being able to withstand drops of up to 1.5m (about 5 feet) and 1 ton of pressure.  It is also resistant to water with its cap in place, and when it is the drive is IP 54 rated.  That IP 54 rating means that the drive is dust tight and will withstand splashes of water on the drive.  The drive also features USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt connectivity, which means that users will be able to use RAID 0 to its fullest.  The drive in RAID 0 will be able to get up to 240MB/s sustain performance.  The drive is compatible with all operating systems and it also includes LaCie Private-Public software.  The software enables users to password protect the entire device or just certain volumes with AES-256 encryption.

The LaCie Rugged RAID will be available in 4TB capacity with a MSRP of $449.99 later this quarter from LaCie’s online store and authorized LaCie resellers.  The drive will carry a three-year limited warranty that users can extend or upgrade.  The warranty provides worldwide repair and/or replacement, so this drive is ready for your adventures around the world.

The post CES 2015: LaCie Announces The New Rugged RAID Mobile Drive appeared first on VR World.

During the raid on Kim Dotcom’s property, the NZ Police took countless computers and hard drives from his residence and offices, many of which were fully encrypted. However, there was a lot of data on those drives that the NZ Police had no right in sharing with the FBI or any US authorities. In fact, they had already shared copies of the drives’ encrypted data to the FBI, which by now has probably cracked the encryption without Kim Dotcom’s keys. Kim’s lawyers have been wrangling with the policy negotiating whether or not he would provide the encryption keys to them and under what circumstances.

According to a recent ruling, a judge has ruled that the NZ Police cannot provide the FBI with any of the keys that Kim Dotcom may provide them with in order to access the data on the hard drives. The problem is that all of these assets were effectively seized from Kim Dotcom’s residence and offices without any real evidence of wrong-doing and they still haven’t really provided much of a case against him. Kim Dotcom is still technically under house arrest but he hasn’t really been found guilty of any official charges because the Crown Prosecution has failed on many counts trying to include evidence that would later be thrown out. Realistically, most of what the New Zealand authorities have done to Kim Dotcom has been mostly unfounded and based upon murky charges levied by US authorities, which technically have no jurisdiction over New Zealand. Furthermore, they are still trying to have him extradited to the US where they would try to get him to stand trial, but the possibility that he will be extradited is hopefully low considering all of the mistakes the New Zealand authorities have made.

The justice that ruled against the NZ authorities sharing Dotcom’s keys with the FBI and other agencies ruled this partially because they had already provided the US authorities with harddrives and copies of data that they weren’t supposed to give them to begin with. This once again shows the New Zealand authorities’ incompetence as well as the likelihood of how unfounded the US authorities’ case was when they had initiated the raid on Dotcom’s property and Megaupload.

The post NZ Police Can't Share Kim Dotcom's Encryption Keys with FBI appeared first on VR World.