Customer Reviews

LaCie 250 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive ( 300728U )

5 star:		(54)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

A couple of things... First, I had to learn the hard way that this device is not Windows Supported. You woun't learn about it until its too late, but most products go through testing to be certified as Windows Compatable. This is not. They either haven't passed Windows testing or haven't bothered.

That said, it wasn't until I defragmented the drive and had over 150GB of information erased. Initially, I thought it was the defragmentation program, but after running a diagnostic on the drive, I found that it has a physical defect.

It wasn't until I researched that I found that this is common with this brand. Also, the USB cord is about 15 inches long. So don't plan on putting it anywhere far from your computer.

Yes. It has an OK design by Porsche. Too bad the it doesn't run like a Porsche. This is an extremely compact drive, with no heat sink whatsoever. The drive gets VERY VERY hot. While researching my own problems with this drive, I found that many people have lost their data due to it overheating.

Purchase at your own risk! (OR install your own cooling system that the manufacturer forgot, get a longer USB, and scan for defects when you first get it)!! Not recommended if you have data that you can't live without... you risk losing it using this drive!

**** However, LaCie Seems to have gotten it right with their new eSATA drives (available here on amazon.com). Now, there are 2 similar 'looking' drives, d2 and SATA external... I'm referring to the external SATA. (Triple Interface Firewire, USB etc. is just too slow for a hard drive, get the external SATA (eSATA) if you can). LaCie resolves heat issus and speed issues (with the SATA not firewire or usb) in their new external SATA drive. At the very least, it is as fast as your internal hard drive (SATA only, not usb or firewire). So, to get a low cost high quality blazing fast drive, which LaCie can give, search Amazon for LaCie External SATA, I've got 2!

I've got to say I'm really worried about my hard drive failing after reading all of these reviews. But to be honest I have not had the same problems (crosses fingers). My hard drive has worked admirably for over a year. I do not however hold anything near and dear to my heart on this drive (probably the most important thing I have on my drive is all of my music) and I use it mainly for weekly back-ups of my computer. So to start my little review off:

Systems used with Hard Drive:

- Powerbook running Panther and Tiger (PPC)

- IBM Thinkpad running Windows XP

What I've used this hard-drive for:

- making a disk image of my whole computer hard drive for a new OS install

- backing up all of my important files right before the last gasps of my computer hard drive

- weekly backups of all files

- movies, tv, music

- running seldom used programs off of the external drive such as Photoshop

Pro's:

- CHEAP- it is even cheaper now, I think I bought mine for about 140ish more than a year ago.

- Aesthetically pleasing

- has been dependable for me (crosses fingers)- I have traveled with it on one road trip where I put it in a suit case between my clothes.

- plug and play for both OS's although you must make sure you format the drive in a format that both OS's can use. Currently since the IBM is no longer using the drive I have formatted it only for Mac.

Neutral:

- Speed- fast enough for archiving and running some meaty programs off of it such as Photoshop (although of course slower than on my actual harddrive), but it is not a speedster by far. I imagine a firewire800 external would be much, much faster. Advertised specs are 480Mps, 7200 rpm... not too shabby for the price.

- Software- clunky, ugly and user unfriendly from a Mac standpoint, but it works. I use dotMac's backup utility instead, which works without a hitch on the external.

- Heat- runs warm, but not hot. And definitely not as hot as my Powerbook. I've taken the precaution of putting my external on some makeshift stilts to elevate it about 1/2" to increase air cooling after reading all these horrid reviews, but I ran the drive for over a year just sitting on a plain desk in an air-conditioned room.

- Sound- As loud as my old minitower pc harddrive. Which means it isn't quiet, but it isn't out of the ordinary loud compared to a harddrive in a cheap desktop. Also mine makes a click at the end when it stops spinning. I'm overly paranoid from all these reviews.

Cons:

- Short USB- but a long one might effect the speed as stated in earlier reviews

- Badly placed on/off switch- if you never turn your hard drive off it won't bother you and eventually even if you do turn your hard drive on and off a lot you will get use to it. Not a big con.

So there you have it. A solid 4 stars for me. Although after reading all of these reviews if I were buying an external to store my photos (and other files I feel are priceless and irreplaceable) and that was the only place I was storing my photos, I would not buy this hard drive based on other people's unfortunate experiences. I mainly use this hard drive to back up my laptop hard drive and the odds of both of my hard drives failing at the exact same time are slim, so this has been a good (ie cheap) value for me... especially since it did save my rear when my actual laptop hard drive did fail.

I have three of these drives and all of them have experienced thermal related failures.

The Maxtor drives aren't bad, they are just more susceptible to damaged from overheating than a comparable Seagate or a Western Digital.

My Dell Precision 670 had two 200Gb MaxLine SATA drives they both failed because the room was too hot for them. Dell replaced them with Western Digital drives, they've been OK for a year now vs. two months for the Maxtors.

The hard drive needs air flowing over it and an ambient temperature of below 20 degrees celcius to work with normal temperatures, i.e. not exceeding 50 degrees celcius.

Unfortunately, the mounting of the drive was faulty on all of my LaCie enclosures so the heat was not able to escape adequately to the casing and dissapate.

I achieved a 15 degree reduction in temperature by putting a small amount of thermal conductivity paste on the screws and then making sure the screws were tightly holding the drive to the chassis.

Still, why should I have to do all of this after shelling out all the cash! I won't be buying any more LaCie products, nice looking, badly engineered.

Get these when they're on sale, which is fairly often. LaCie is a packager: they take drives from Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor (which is part of Seagate now) and other major manufacturers and put them into their neatly designed Porsche housings.

Contrary to the some of the reviews here, LaCie doesn't use cheap or sub-standard drives. But drives are electro-mechanical devices and they do fail. Statistically the overall number of failures is low, but that isn't any consolation when it's your drive that fails and takes your data with it. Media failure is a fact of life. Trusting your backups to a single medium is an invitation to disaster.

On the other hand, particularly when you get these LaCie drives at the lowest price, using two or three in rotation for backing up your data is economical and safe.

The housings are practically as small as the 3.5" drive itself. Heat-dissipation is excellent and there is no need for a fan. The power block is relatively small. The only thing you might not like is the very short USB cable provided by LaCie, but that's easily remedied: get a longer one.

Overall, these LaCie 250GB drives are excellent values. Follow what data professionals do and use more than one drive for backing up your data and you'll be well satisifed with these units.

Incidentally, these units are also very handy for transporting data from one location to another.

Jerry

Seems most people here are getting a mix of drives. The one I just bought off the shelf at a local big-box retailer contains a Hitachi drive. I'm pretty happy about that, although I'd prefer a Seagate. I feel bad for everyone who got one of these stuffed with a Maxtor-- even for the current insanely low price I'd have to take such a box back. The Hitachi is running very quiet and cool so far and my XP machines have picked up the USB-->IDE hardware with no problems or headaches. I am copying 50gb worth of test data over to the drive and I can't even hear it running, although it's going about as fast as I'd expect from USB.

Remember that most hard drives either fail in the first 7-30 days of usage or sometime around the 2-4 year mark (unless they are WDs, in which case they will last precisely 366 days-- or Maxtors, in which case one just never knows). This is the way it has always been and the way it will always be until all hard drives are made of solid-state flash memory or "other." Even the best manufacturers have a lot of drives that are DOA or die shortly after being switched on. It really does behoove you to beat the crap out of the drive the first week you have it to make sure it's not going to fail. Copy stuff onto it, delete it, copy some more stuff onto it, leave the thing running 24/7. If it makes it through 5-7 days of reasonable abuse, you're probably OK. But whatever you do, DON'T use ANY external drive for a backup project and then delete all data from the other drives, especially within 15 minutes of opening the box. Hard drives need to be broken in before they can be reasonably trusted. You are playing with fire if you are using any brand new drive as your only copy of *anything*. I don't really feel bad for you, and shame on you for blaming LaCIE for your lack of computer savvy.

There's no doubt this disk is small and good looking, and a good price for a 250gb drive. But it makes more noise when idle than my other 2 external USB drives combined. When it's accessing data, the horribly loud clicking noises can easily be heard across the room during quiet movie scenes. It runs hot but does not have an automatic shutoff. (To be fair, most USB hard drives don't but a Porsche design should!). You can't solve this problem by using the on/off switch since it's this tiny thing in the BACK of the drive near the corner of the overhanging side and top - very hard to use for normal sized hands by feel alone. Maybe seems like a nit, but a portable drive really ought to have the sockets for the power and usb installed right side up so you don't have to remember to turn the sides with the icons down when inserting. It was plug'n'play on xp sp2, came formatted in fat32 with the dirty flag turned on so you have to run chhksk /f before running convert. You decide: looks or personality?
Update March 2007. I guess it's only fair to let you know that both of the ones I bought 2 years ago are still clicking and over-heating along. I don't use them everyday as they're for backups that I rotate offsite - which means that they travel in my backpack every couple of weeks. I'd up my star rating to 3 or 4 now if I could.
Update May 2008. Both of mine still running fine.
Update June 2009. This will be the last update. Not becuase they are broken. They're still clicking away. I'm just running out of room on them and am switching to 500gb WD Passports. I got my money's worth out of these LaCies!

OK, I bought a LaCie 200GB drive, and it ran solid for a month. So I bought 3 more, b/c they were inexpensive and looked nice. One month later, 2 of the drives are saying they are corrupted and are no longer in NFTS format (!) after I'd put 100+GB of info on each. A 3rd never worked and just makes clicking noises (I'm sending it back to LaCie). The 4th I haven't touched since it backed up one of the first 2.

I suppose it was a mistake to buy 4 of the same kind. But I've tried these drives on 2 different Windows computers, and first they worked and then they didn't. On both. With multiple cables/USB cords, etc. What a drag.

I wish I'd bought a variety of drives.

I have recently purchased two of these drives. It is, undeniably, the most aesthetically pleasing external drive on the market. The skills of the Porsche design team have been used to great effect to produce a unit that is sleek, compact and discrete, yet at the same time being pleasingly conspicuous by virtue of its surface quality.

But what is a drive for, what is its function? Is it to be used as an item of well-designed desk art, or as an electronic storage device? Dull it may be, but the latter is the only sensible answer. And, while this drive's design looks great, it also seems to contribute to physical flaws that subvert its reliability.

The unit's compactness seems to lead to it running at a scorching high temperature. These drives are meant to be stackable, but my experience is that to stack these units only adds to the heat build-up, and to such an extent that the unit at the bottom of the stack becomes literally untouchable.

After just one week of operation, one of my drives stopped working, with a loud clicking sound coming from inside the casing. I lost 160GB of data. My enquiries with disk recovery specialists produced a depressing prognosis - it seems that the disks in these units have a low success rate for data recovery and I was told, effectively, to forget about any hopes for retrieving my data.

LaCie was of little help. Its email-based technical support seems to be capable only of sending out automated, generic responses to posted queries. Thankfully, Amazon will refund my money under its 30-day returns policy without any fuss - if only all organizations had Amazon's customer service ethos.

Looks are fine, but when it comes to my data, I want reliability above all else. My own experience of this drive is that it cannot be trusted to store data with confidence. I would never buy one again. Next time, I'll buy the ugliest drive on the market and hope for a better outcome.

While I appreciate all the great feedback, I also noticed there are a lot more negative ones on Amazon compared to Buy.com. For the exact same product, 250GB Lacie USB 2.0. Do Amazon shoppers complains more or do Buy.com filter out the complaints?

Pro:

1. Great look, small, metal casing.

2. High 250 GB capacity with low price.

3. Fast USB 2.0 transfer with 8MB buffer

4. Plug & Play for PC users.

5. Quiet (not silent)

Con:

1. Short 1 foot USB cable.

2. Drive gets pretty hot. (all drives gets hot)

Here are "some" complaints from other users. Can not confirm this is due to user or a defective product.

1. Mac users had problem installing.

2. Some reported drive failure.

3. Loud clicking sound. (most likely a defective drive)

Hope this helps.

Like several of the other reviewers, my computer (new Dell) won't recognize it. Tried downloading the driver on the utilities disc, rebooting, reconnecting, troubleshooting, reading FAQ's, going to LaCie website, etc. Others say theirs plugged and played with no trouble. Mine just sits there like a useless lump. Based on the extreme positive and negative views, I assume some work fine and others don't work at all. Question is, which one will be shipped to you? Not worth the headache of finding out. Also...I did a lot of comment reading here before buying this. All external hard drives seem to get mixed reviews. Why is this? These things are so important. Can't anyone build a reliable one?