LaCie and Porsche Design have joined forces before to make beautiful external hard drives together and now they have done it again. They have just unveiled two new hard drives: the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile P’9220 and the Desktop P’9230 Hard Drives.

These hard drives both have fast USB 3.0 ports and a super sleek aluminum frame that is a real beauty. Pricing for the mobile hard drive starts at $104.99 for the 500GB model, while $119.99 is the price for the Desktop hard drive with 1TB of data, and the 2TB model is $159.99. Both will be available soon.

If you are in the market for a more stylish USB drive, than the new LaCie Galet 4GB USB drive might be what you are after. LaCie has teamed up with French luxury brand Christofle to create the design for their new LaCie Galet. Each piece is individually plated with precious silver using Christofle’s 150 year-old silvering process.

The French-finished memory LaCie 4GB drive comes in a gift box and can even be worn as a necklace if you want. The LaCie Galet is available now for £94.99 ($152) and includes LaCie’s Private-Public software with password protection.

As far as gadgets go, USB hubs have never been sexy. Functional yes, but never sexy. LaCie’s Hub4 is trying to change that with a curved exterior and some blue USB jacks. You get four USB 3.0 ports in all for all of your SuperSpeed gadgets.

Just remember that you’ll need at least one 3.0 connector on your computer to make the most of this USB device. Aside from that you’ll just need $59.99. Sexy or not? You decide.

LaCie has introduced the FastKey, the company’s smallest SSD USB 3.0 drive. The device combines three technologies in one: SSD, USB 3.0 and DRAM cache. This helps it to deliver speeds of up to 260MB/s, so you can transfer 1000 MP3 or 5 DIVX files in less than 60 seconds flat.

The LaCie FastKey also supports AES 256-bit encryption. Expect the LaCie FastKey to be available in 30GB ($149.99), 60GB ($249.99) and 120GB ($474.99) capacities.

LaCie has released a new Mac USB 3.0 driver. No Mac ships with a USB 3.0-ready port by default, so the driver can only support accessories on a Mac Pro equipped a LaCie PCI Express adapter, or a MacBook Pro with the company’s ExpressCard/34 adapter. Either way, Mac OS X 10.5 is required.

The company is claiming that it delivers speeds of up to 130MBps for single hard drives, and 220MBps for dual hard drives. Several models are compatible, including the Minimus, as well as USB 3.0 versions of the 2big, d2, Rugged and Rikiki.

LaCie’s new 324i offers a premium feature set to go along with it’s premium price. Of course it’s aimed at creative pros who need a 10-bit P-IPS panel, exceedingly wide color gamuts (102 percent NTSC; 98 percent Adobe RGB), a slew of input connectors which include DVI-D, HDMI, component and DisplayPort, 178-degree viewing angles and an anti-glare coating.

The 24-inch panel features a 1920 x 1200 resolution, and the stand allows users to pivot the display for horizontal or vertical viewing. The picture quality is said to be absolutely stunning.

When it comes to tech gear it seems like every maker wants to say they have the smallest this or fastest that. The latest new products in the tech realm to lay claim to a world’s smallest title is LaCie with a pair of new USB 3.0 HDDs.

The new drives are the LaCie Rikiki and the Minimus USB 3.0 HDDs. The USB 3.0 connectivity allows the drives to have transfer speeds up to5Gb/s in small form factors. Both of the HDDs are clad in attractive brushed aluminum cases.

I have a bunch of flash drives lying around my office and they are all fat drives that block USB ports and need to be plugged into a port with a lot of room around it. This is a huge pain, especially if you are on a netbook or notebook with only a few ports.

LaCie has debuted a new flash drive called the MosKeyto that is tiny and looks more like one of those nano receivers for wireless mice and keyboards than a flash drive. The little drive measures 21 x 16 x 10mm and weighs 10g. You can plug the tiny drive into the USB port and just leave it if you want.

We are slowly but surely moving toward USB 3.0 and HP if now one of the first to ship a laptop with USB 3.0 ports. Specifically, these laptops are certain variations of the Envy 15 quad-core notebook, which will support the faster data transfers of up to 5Gbps.

USB 3.0 adoption has gotten off to a slow start, but HP doesn’t want to miss out. USB 3.0 is already being used for hard drives from LaCie and Western Digital and should be useful for SSDs that get bottlenecked by USB 2.0.

I will be glad when USB 3.0 gear hits the market in full force. I am tired of waiting what feels like ages for my backup to complete. LaCie and Symwave have announced a new USB 3.0 dual-drive RAID solution that will be shown off at CES.

The drive is called the LaCie 2Big USB 3.0 drive and is fitted with dual discs and can operate in RAID 0/1 configuration. The drive can be had with up to 4TB of storage and will ship with backup software for Windows and Mac computers.

Remember that James Bond movie with the Ice hotel? The entire hotel was sculpted out of Ice and it’s for real too. Everything in the hotel is completely usable. Similarly, artist Katie Paterson taken the idea and made recordings of 3 glaciers (the Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull and Solheimajökull) of Iceland.

She pressed them into three records that were cast and frozen with the melt water from each of the glaciers. When the time came, the records were played on three separate turntables non-stop until they melted. The process took only 2 hours.

The new LaCie Starck drives are super sexy and look like melting chrome. Has storage ever been this sensuous? They were designed by Philippe Starck. The pair come in the form of the LaCie Starck Mobile Hard Drive and Desktop Hard Drive.

Some features include an LED indicator in the shape of Starck’s sign that is projected onto the table, and the fact that the surface is touch sensitive, so you can assign actions to different kinds of touch. For instance, a tap will trigger the launch of an application, while a caress can start an automatic backup.

LaCie’s Sound2 USB speakers almost look too good. What are they hiding? Are they overcompensating for something? Hmmm. You don’t usually think LaCie when you think audio, but these look so nice we are willing to believe that they must sound good too. We hope.

The Sound2 laptop speakers are USB-powered, with the audio coming from Cabasse, a French audio company. They were designed by Neil Poulton and will cost you $100. Like Fox Mulder, we “want to believe” that these beauties sound good at that price.

The Moxi HD now has a media extender box and a new software update, which allows the Moxi to offload video to Lacie’s 6TB drive clusters. That translates to over 1000 hours of HDTV. The Moxi Mate is a small $399 ($199 if purchased in a bundle or by an existing Moxi HD customer) satellite box that plays back recordings from your Moxi HD over your home network.

It’s low on features and has no support for more than one Moxi Mate at a time, but at least you can stream your Moxi library around the house if that’s what you want.

LaCie just updated their LaCinema HD media streamer lineup with the new Play and Record models. The former can playback media while the latter can also function as an HD DVR. Both are wireless and can stream 1080p media from the network to your TV and upscale standard def movies to 1080i.

They come with either 500GB or 1TB of internal storage. The Record has added DVR capability for anyone looking to get rid of the set top box entirely. Looks like prices will start at $430.