Customer Reviews

LaCie 1 TB Big Disk Extreme External Hard Drive with Triple Interface ( 300797U )

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

Compared to Similar Drives:

I've owned the drive for about 8 months, and must say that I've loved it from day one. Similar Raid drives that I've had experience with have either burned out or have noisy fans. I also use the Lacie Rugged portable drive. With my MacBook Pro, I've used both intensely with great results. I've had experience with many other Raid and portable drives.

Cooling and Noise:

Since the hard drives are mounted next to eachother by the skinny side, and not by the fat side like most Raids, they do not generate so much heat for eachother. The drive stays very cool, even after intense hours of running during massive video encoding or batch picture processing. This is also helped since the stress is spread across drives. As mentioned, most Raid's are like a 747 with noise and still stay very hot. This drive is calm, stable, and quite, no matter what you do to it.

Speed:

Even when daisy-chaining two other HD's and a scanner, this thing is still blazing. With a 100gb transfer of pictures, I clocked it at around 80-100 mb/s. When copying and pasting, it makes a light noise, rather than a loud chug chug clack clack from one side of the HD to the other.

Travel and Wear:

As a transient college student, I have traveled many time with this drive with no problems. Its been subjected to cheep air conditioners and heaters, along with very humid dorm rooms. No problems, always ran without a hitch. Even though the drive is thin, it still stays very stable with its heavy metal stand.

Quality:

This thing is a beauty and looks its price. The case and vertical stand are made of solid metal, and you can feel its weight and quality. Its connections are tight and well located. The cooling system is quiet and worked fanastically.

Other Reviews:

Unfortunately with high-end HD's, who are mostly bought by busy professionals, buyers seem to only take the time to review if they've had a bad experience. Would you write your congressmen to tell him you were happy? If you look at reviews of other Raid drives, such as Western Digital, you'll see similar bad reviews, people saying they switched to Lacie. Those drives are genuinely noisy and have other concerns, however. You don't know if people are throwing things on top of them or knocking them around all of the time, or tearrying them out while there processing data. Overall, a great product product.

Both of my LaCie Big Disk Extremes have been returned to manufacturer within a year of purchase due to power issues. In each case I have lost time and valuable data (they reformat the drive after repair as stardard operating procedure). Lacie makes decent drives so this surprised me. Later models may have fixed the problem, but the LaCie Big Disk Extreme has issues.

Then simply stopped working. After some additional research LaCie has a reputation for unreliable drives (which I knew ahead of time having bought LaCie drive years ago and then stopped). Typical failure rates of 40+% in under a year. Buy drives from anybody else. Fortunately all I kept on this disk were system backups and I can simply start using another disk.

I read many reviews giving a bad rating to this item because of drive failures. Yes, there is a chance that your external hard drive will fail. Lacie has no worse a reputation than other vendors (or no better). My advice: buy two drives, and setup a mirrored volume. Both Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X support this. This is the best guarantee against a drive failure: when a drive fails, you won't lose a byte of information. I've been doing this for years, and never looked back. Peace of mind comes at this price.

As for this particular drive, it works perfectly, it's fast and quiet, and the Firewire interfaces offer outstanding speeds.

I liked this ext. hd because it has Firewire 800. This is a must for the highest speed transfers to backup your computer or large data sets.

Push the blue button to turn on and off, don't forget to unmount/eject first tho.

If the unit goes to sleep, the wake time is a bit long, but that's very minor.

Works great for my macbook pro, and with multiple ports, any computer is accommodated.

I also bought a maxtor 1tb hd and it is just as good...only shorter and more boxy. I like Lacie's thinner profile, but it was more expensive than the Maxtor unit.

i never tried the software, I only store my video and photo collections so I just drag and drop.

Overall, a near perfect product. Only improvement needed is even faster cables and faster storage media...only in the future...

Having had problems with a previous USB drive I bought the Lacie as a replacement having been brought under the impression that it was a superior quality (and therefore more expensive) than the previous drive.

It has lasted one week and after hours on the phone to the manufacturer's support line no one has a clue what the fault is.

This drive and it's support team are a complete waste of time and money.

I have the 1.2 TB LaCie. Loved this thing - enough capacity to backup my other computers, rugged, ran relatively cool, nice looking. Worth the $800 that I spent in Jan 2006. And then 4 wks ago it failed, after only 1-1/2 yrs. Of course, it's no longer under warranty. Would expect better from LaCie and at this price range. (Granted, they are much less expensive now). Fortunately the drive contained only backups, so no critical data was lost.

Update to my review (Feb 8, 2011).... After reading several other posts about faulty LaCie power supplies on other websites, I decided to take a risk and purchase a new power supply. For me, at least, this fixed the problem with both drives (500GB and 1TB). As the power supplies seem to be the root causes of the problem, I've made these LaCie drives backups to my backup drives. That is, I plug them in long enough to make a second backup of my data and then unplug and put them into storage. This will hopefully prolong the life of the power supplies and avoid the necessity to replace them on a yearly basis. I still stick to my 0 to 1 star rating as no one should have to replace the power supplies every year. So, the latest status is...

80GB FA Porsche - Almost 4 years and working fine
250GB San Hecht - 2+ years and working fine
500GB Big Disk Extreme - Working again with new power supply
1T Big Disk Extreme - Working again with new power supply


(July 24, 2009)
I have 4 LaCie drives..

80GB FA Porsche - 2+ years and working fine
250GB San Hecht - 1+ years and working fine
500GB Big Disk Extreme - Dead in less than 1 year
1T Big Disk Extreme - Dying as I write this (less than 1 year of use)

The first drive I bought was the 80GB which has been working fine for almost 3 years. Based on the success with this, I purchased the 500GB drive which, after less than 1 year, started to dismount on its own. After another few weeks, it wouldn't mount at all - just the click, click, click and rapid flashing light indicating the loss of all my backup data.

Not having time to diagnose the problem, I quickly purchased the 1T to re-back up my data ASAP. It's less than 1 year old and the drive started dismounting on its own last week. This time, I know what's coming. I will be purchasing another 1T+ backup drive that DOES NOT have the name LaCie stamped into it. That was my last Lacie product.

I bought one 5 months ago, but was a little leery after reading some of the negative feedback. It has been a real pleasure to use! I like it so much and find it so reliable and fast, I am here buying another one!

My LaCie hard drive just quit working for no reason. Clicks and clicks and no recognition any longer from my Mac. All my music is on there. Luckily, I can capture off my IPOD but I am disappointed. I read other reviews that say they have a product with a high percentage of failure. I wish I would've known that before I bought one. One should be able to expect more from a back up hard drive. It is your back up.