If you prefer everything on your desk to be a stunning example of industrial design, LaCie’s new Sphère is an external hard drive you won’t want to hide behind your monitor. It looks like a giant drop of mercury thanks to its hand-crafted and highly-polished silver-plated steel housing which helps explain why you’ll be paying $500 or more for just a single terabyte of storage.
But the Sphère isn’t targeted at those whose primary concern is storage capacity. It will really only appeal to those who care about aesthetics and branding, since the drive’s housing was designed and is being manufactured by Christofle at the company’s silversmith workshop in Yainville, France. That’s quite a pedigree for an external drive, and to ensure it’s not all uglied up by cables, a single USB 3 tether is all that’s needed for power and data. If anything, it’s nice to see how the one-percenters store their data. [LaCie]