"...Leveraging its 3-month lead as the first to ship a 24x10x40x CD-RW drive with both USB and FireWire connectivity, LaCie announced today that the volume of drives being sold has enabled the company to slash the price of the drive to an unprecedented $299 after the mail-in rebate.

With the ability to write CD-Rs at 3.6 MB/s (24X)— the industry's highest CD recording speed-- the LaCie 24x10x40 CD-RW can burn a complete 650MB CD in about 3 minutes. The same drive can be used to rewrite CD-RW discs at 1.5 MB/s (10X)--the industry's fastest rewrite speed. The LaCie CD-RW drive also provides 40x playback and fast, 150ms access.

To achieve USB and IEEE 1394 (U&I) functionality, LaCie incorporates both a FireWire controller and a USB controller in the new 24x10x40x CD-RW drives. When the drive is connected to a FireWire interface, performance is more than 12 Mbytes/second. When the USB interface is used, the LaCie hard drives deliver a sustained performance of up to 750Kbytes/second. Designed with true plug-and-play capabilities, the FireWire and USB buses make the LaCie drives hot-pluggable--they can be removed or swapped without having to shutdown or reboot the system. The drives mount automatically as soon as they are connected, giving users the convenience of being able to add, remove or swap the drive without having to restart the computer.

LaCie's 24x10x40x CD-RW can be used with most types of CD-R and CD-RW media, including the latest 16x 700MB CD-R discs which provide 6 additional minutes of audio storage or 50MB of data storage, compared to standard 650MB/74-minute CD-R discs. When quality 16X CD-R media is used, it will be checked by the drive and burned at 24X, when possible. If media is not 24X-capable, the drive will automatically downshift to 16X. All LaCie-branded 16X media is 24X compatible and higher-performance media has already been introduced by LaCie and other manufacturers..."