Customer Reviews

LaCie 300510 External FireWire 7200 RPM 80 GB Hard Drive (d2 Case)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

LaCie 80GB external FireWire hard drive.

Comes with hard drive, 1x 6pin firewire cable, small power brick, seperate wire to attach power brick to outlet, 2 software disks, and other papers. Also comes with a cable lock slot on the back (discourages theft) which isn't mentioned in the descriptions.

Pretty simple realy. Just plug in the power brick, attach to the hard drive (simple, looks Great !!), plug in firewire to back of drive then into your computer. My Apple iBook (Currently OS9.2.2) has a 6pin outlet so it went right in. Power up the hard drive by pressing the blue button and because the drive is pre-prepared it is ready to go. When i did this the 74GB little HD icon appeared on my desktop and I was able to save to it directly. No problems. The hard drive allready had a folder with the information from the two CDs on it which took up space as well as the initial partationing i'm sure. Plug in size was about 74GB. I'll clean it up later.

The firewire transfer rates are very fast. I was able to dump my 8GB or so of MP3s to it in about 9 minutes and i can pretty much stream all the music and data from it to the programs which are on my origional HD. No plans to use video at the moment.

I don't regret spending about 240 for it and i'm sure it will be used for all of my "junk" as well as a convient source for backing up files.

I have owned three external drives over the years, each had it's pro's &
con's.
With this new line of d2 external FW drives, I believe LaCie has done
everything right.
There are no cooling fans, so they are quiet. You do not have to plug it in and unplug it, when you are not using it, the blue power indicator is also an on/ off switch.
I chose the 80 gig because it is ample for my needs.
You do, however have many size options from which to choose.
I can't think of anything I would change on this drive and I bought it based on the high quality of the terrific LaCie d2 CD-RW.
In my view these are two great products.

j.nomograms

THIS DRIVE HAS A 6 PIN FIREWIRE CONNECTION, AND THE ONLY CABLE IT COMES WITH HAS THE 6 PIN CONNECTOR ON BOTH SIDES, AMAZON.COM DOESN'T GIVE THIS INFORMATION. THIS IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE MOST FIREWIRE PORTS I HAVE SEEN ARE THE SMALLER 4 PIN, YOU NEED A SPECIAL CABLE TO GO FROM 4 PIN TO 6 PIN.
Other than that the drive is great, it has 2 firewire ports so you can daisy chain mutiple drives or firewire devices, the drives say they are stackable but that doesn't mean you can stack two and they become one, it just means they can sit ontop of each other. I don't anticipate ever needing more than 80Gb + the 20Gb I have now. I would choose some word other than stackable, a Cisco 1300 series switch is stackable this hard drive isn't.

I really like the versatility and ease of use of this drive. It is a little heavy to be used as a truly portable drive, but if you're just gonna be occasionally carting it around, it works great. I use it for video editing, and the seek times are actually better than my internal HD.

The only reason it doesn't get 5 stars is that I had to format it before I could use it the first time. The computer recognized it automatically as soon as I plugged it in, but I couldn't use it until I formatted (which is a simple two-click operation, but kinda annoying because you then have to wait half an hour before you can use your drive). I'm using Windows XP - I've heard Mac users say they were ready to go immediately.

All in all a great drive. Planning to pick up the 200-GB version for video archiving - I heard the cases stack together easily, so we'll see.

I got mine in December. Installation was pretty easy and everything worked great. Fast enough and plenty of storage for a good price.

Then one day it just didn't work anymore. But it was about 45 days old so it was now in LaCie's hands for warranty.

LaCie authorized to open it and take the IDE drive out and install it in my PC. Didn't work. Wouldn't even power up.

Sent back to LaCie on my FedEx dime and they turned it around with a new drive the same day. Sent on Friday (2 day air) and got it back Thursday next.

I asked for a cross-ship of a new one since it was essentially a new drive but they wouldn't do it. I had to strong-arm LaCie a bit to let me open and test it. Once it was sent back, though, they turned it right around so that part was good service.

Too bad I bought it for a backup and storage drive and all my data is gone.

My wife may never forgive me for losing those files.

nice drive but don't trust your data on it.

I just received this drive and the installation went fairly well (some reordering of the instructions required), the copying speed is fine, and the performance when accessing the drive is similar to my native drive. And its quiet. I hope it continues to perform well.

This drive works fine under Linux with the sbp2 module, kernel version 2.4.20. It is identified as a SCSI drive.

The drive comes in a stylish and relatively small grey solid steel case (the photo is somewhat misleading), giving the impression of being a safe place to store your precious data.
As other have pointed out, a 6-pin to 6-pin cable is included,
if you have a 4-pin socket, you need to buy a cable separately. The drive is not silent, but emits a faint audible clciking sound that is barely audible: no whoosh of a fan.

It looks as tough as a tank, but it isn't. Once it crashed eveyone told me it's a very delicate piece of equipment. I did not carry mine around, for one, it is too heavy. I also only fired it up when I did my monthly backups, so I didn't have it running all the time, so it shouldn't have over heated as others have mentioned. But after less than 11 months, the computer stopped recognizing it---it hums but never gets anywhere. I changed the ports, bought new cables, all to no avail. As it happens, my computer had failed and I was relying on the LaCie back up drive to retrieve my files--what a shock when I couldn't get to them. Tried other computers, both MACs and PCs, and still no sightings of the LaCie drive on the desktop.

Even though still under warranty, I got NO HELP from the LaCie help desk. Their suggestions to use a data recovery application is unhelpful since I couldn't see the drive to select it. They don't even give you a toll free number to call. They also expect you to pay to ship the heavy thing to them even under warranty. They give NO HELP to retrieve data. If you allow anyone to open the case it voids the warranty, but they won't send you the hard drive separately, even if you send them the item intact and it turns out that it's something else.

Head aches, head aches....if it worked, it would be great, but it's not the drive that is important, it is the data and if Lacie hasn't figured out a way to help clients when their products fail, they shouldn't be in this business.

buyer beware! I wouldn't buy another LaCie ever again. Also learned my lesson, two copies are still not enough, especially if one of them is LaCie.

I purchased it from my University Book-Store and could not return it as they had "no return" policy on opened products. The problem I face with this drive is the heavy weight ( more than 3 pounds ) and the need to attach power cord with adaptor. All this makes the hard drive not so portable. I would rather go for something which fits in my pocket and is USB powered.

I have a client running 8 of these drives by La Cie and they have replaced 6 of them within 1 year of purchase. They are not designed to be left running 24/7 because they overheat. My client has lost years worth of data due to the failure rate. What's with using Firewire still anyway? Get a FN clue La Cie and put a fan inside and lose the firewire, fricken MAC lovers.