I've used LaCie drives for years and they seem to fail far less often than other drives I've used (WD, Seagate, Maxtor.) Perhaps one of the reasons that my hard drives fail often is that I tend to be a little rough on them. I edit video, often on location, so I drag my drives all over the place. I'm hoping with it's rubberized shell, this LaCie will go the distance. I love that it is self-powered so I don't have to lug a power adapter with me. It's one of the few portable drives that is fast enough for video editing. I purchased the case LaCie Cozy 3.5-Inch Hard Drive Carrying Case 130903 (Grey) for it as well to further protect it. I'll update this review if it dies.
Update: I've used this drive for a year and it's still going strong. I'm going to upgrade to a larger capacity model soon.
PS - It always makes my day to know that people find these reviews helpful. So, please vote (the "Was this review helpful to you: Yes or No" buttons) and leave a comment if you'd like, even if it's just to say, "Hi!" I respond to all comments so feel free to ask a question about the product. Also, when you leave a comment, I will go to your reviews and pay you the same courtesy. LaCie Rugged All-Terrain 500 GB FireWire 800/ FireWire 400/USB 2.0 7200RPM Portable External Hard Drive 301900
I've used LaCie drives for years and they seem to fail far less often than other drives I've used (WD, Seagate, Maxtor.) Perhaps one of the reasons that my hard rives fail often is that I tend to be a little rough on them. I edit video, often on location, so I drag my drives all over the place. I'm hoping with it's rubberized shell, this LaCie will go the distance. I love that it is self-powered so I don't have to lug a power adapter with me. It's one of the few portable drives that is fast enough for video editing. I purchased the case LaCie Cozy 3.5-Inch Hard Drive Carrying Case 130903 (Grey) for it as well to further protect it. I'll update this review if it dies.
Update: I've used this drive for a year and it's still going strong! I'm going to upgrade to a larger capacity model soon.
PS - It always makes my day to know that people find these reviews helpful. So, please vote (the "Was this review helpful to you: Yes or No" buttons) and leave a comment if you'd like, even if it's just to say, "Hi!" I respond to all comments so feel free to ask a question about the product. Also, when you leave a comment, I will go to your reviews and pay you the same courtesy.
I purchased this item from Amazon on Feb 10, 2010.
It fails on Mar 2, 2010.
It worked great for the first 20 odd days!
I contacted Lacie on Mar 2 and got the run-around for two days. I purchased the $49.99 Premium Care for this drive to help expedite support.
It is now Mar 5, and Lacie has not responded to my support ticket (the last correspondence indicated I still needed to pay for shipment back to Lacie.
Advise - NEVER purchase any support from Lacie - they have no clue what it really means. Seagate offers a $19.99 advance replacement program which I have used once and the experience with them was awesome.
-Shawn
I have owned this for about 4 months and I believe that it's great. I have tested it on both a Mac and Windows computer and it performs well on either computer.
Here's what I love about this hard drive:
-7200 rpm: This is how fast the drive spins. The 7200 rmp allows faster copying and writing to the drive and to your computer. See Speed Tests below.
-FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0: These are all the ways you can connect the hard dive to your computer. I can connect the hard drive to my PC with the included USB 2.0 cable and when I need to use it on my Mac, I can either plug it into the Mac with the same USB cable or just switch to using a FireWire 800 if I want faster copying/writing to the drive.
-No power cord needed: The drive gets its power from your computer when you connect it with one of the cables. If you have an older computer, LaCie does include an extra USB cord that provides power to the drive. You just plug in the extra USB to power the drive and another cable (USB or FireWire) to your computer.
-Portable: This drive is small enough to carry in a purse or briefcase and doesn't take much space. It's also very light!
Speed Tests:
USB 2.0 - Copying a 1 GB file from PC to LaCie takes about 50 seconds. Copying a 1 GB file from LaCie to PC takes about 45 seconds.
FireWire 400 - Copying a 1 GB file from PC to LaCie takes about 29 seconds. Copying a 1 GB file from LaCie to PC takes about 25 seconds.
FireWire 800 - Copying a 1 GB file from PC to LaCie takes about 20 seconds. Copying a 1 GB file from LaCie to PC takes about 17 seconds.
In response to reviews that say the drive has failed, I have not have my drive fail at all.
Was all good for about a year. Then started acting funny. Would stop spinning while still mounted. Customer service was fast and after troubleshooting wouldn't help. I was able to send it in for repair. Repair was free and took about 2 weeks.
I've purchased a lot of portable drives in the past 10 years. I've had problems with many of them, even others from LaCie.
I don't buy USB only devices. USB is slow, and my time is worth more than the few dollars difference to get multiple interfaces on my drives. I use Firewire 800 when possible, but it's nice that USB works.
Portable drives get thrown around a lot more than a desktop unit, and with passive cooling it's no surprise they have a higher failure rate. I've found out the hard way that the most reliable devices are those that don't push the engineering limits of the case, and contain a drive that's a bit more mature. Thus, I don't get the "biggest" drive and I try to select drive sizes that I know have been shipping for some time. Since performance is important to me, I select 7200 RPM drives although they tend to run hotter than the 5400 RPM devices.
I've carried my latest LaCie 320GB 7200RPM drive back and forth to work every day for over a year, I run my email off of it and have never had a failure with this drive or any of the Rugged Terrain enclosures I've been using since they started shipping. When I'm loading the drive up with it's initial 70GB of data, it gets hot, but unless I'm doing a lost of copying, or backing up the entire device, it stays warm, not hot.
I've got at least 8 of these in use around my company, not one has failed. I hope you are as lucky as I am! - External Hard Drive - Firewire 800 - Portable Hard Drive - Firewire 400'
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