In passing, it looks like any typical collection of '90s beige. These pictures do not do justice to the LaCie Tsunami.
Tsunami was first advertised (as far as I've been able to find) in MacWorld May 1990 and sold well into the latter half of the decade.
To me, Tsunami is the epitome of early '90s design. It is the '80s Memphis-Milano design style of bold colors and assorted geometric forms distilled down to one scalloped edge, a single brief non-functional decorative line, a row of evenly-spaced dots, and one large circle. It is the chaos of over-the-top form-over-function visual noise reduced to a handful of non-overlapping shapes washed in boring '90s computer beige and grey. It is from that point at the apex of a design trend where the trend's makeup is so well understood it can be referenced by merely hinting at constituent components.
Removed from its context, the design seems strange. It defiantly lacks symmetry. Its embellishments sit on top of the form, lacking any obvious purpose or cohesion with each other or the whole. The product name only minimally informs a single aspect of the design. The only thing really breaking up this monotony of beige is one offset grey cylinder cutting across the face. These seemingly disparate elements are all that are left of the haphazardly stacked shapes, thick bold lines, and loud colors of the design movement which gave birth to it.
And yet the design is balanced. Breaking perhaps from the direction the tend moved, it doesn't feel as though it will topple over at any moment. The extreme weight of the grey cylinder is countered by the tiny dash extending past the end of the case on the one side, and by a window-like square of four smaller squares on the other side. When placed wave-side down, the dots serve as a sort of foundation; when wave-side up, the dots buoyantly draw the eye to the crest of each wave like bubbles underwater with the other elements anchoring the design to the seafloor. In all, it takes what would otherwise be a plain beige box and turns it into something interesting and dynamic, without resorting to the arrays of lines or dots which plagued its contemporaries in the computer industry (as seen in the initial photo).
And that's why I like it. It is a product of its era that does everything it can to visually stand out from the products of its era. It could only have existed in the time period in which it lived.
I have briefly mentioned the Tsunami here before, when I repaired a unit that I had found at Computer Reset. Its drive is long since dead and its case is looking far more brown than beige, but with some repairs its power supply still works. I use it whenever I need an external enclosure for a SCSI device, though it often just holds a BlueSCSI or similar. It's just too great of an example of its era of design not to hold on to.
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