LaCie Hard Disk 500 GB FireWire 400/USB 2.0/eSATA External Hard Drive, Design by Neil Poulton 301313U

Other products by LaCie

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.6 x 1.8 inches ; 3.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00170H0O6
• Item model number: 301313U
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (125 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,086 in Electronics (See Bestsellers in Electronics)

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  Electronics > Computers & Accessories > Memory Cards & External Storage > Hard Drives

• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 1, 2008

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description
The LaCie Hard Disk 301313U 500 GB eSATA/FireWire 400/USB 2.0 External Hard Drive, Design by Neil Poulton is a sleek, sophisticated hard drive that offers high-speed performance and style to your desktop. With universal compatibility and a compact size, this portable drive lets you easily back-up and share your music, photos and video files with your friends and family.

The Lacie Hard Disk 500 GB eSATA/FireWire 400/USB 2.0 External Hard Drive, Design by Neil Poulton: Has 500 GB of disk space. Features eSATA, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0 interfaces for utmost speed and compatibility. Uses a fanless design for near-silent operation. Features a drive with 7200 RPM and 8 MB of cache for maximum performance. Free one-year online backup service.

The gorgeous, minimalist case was designed by Neil Poulton. View larger.

Three connection interfaces offers true universal compatibility and speed. View larger.

Beautiful, Stunning Design
Designed by internationally acclaimed designer Neil Poulton, the Hard Disk features sleek and sophisticated styling. The case is entirely black with a fashionable, mirror-polished finish. A cool, blue LED strip on the bottom casts an ambient glow. The ultra-minimalist look will blend perfectly into home entertainment setups and workstations.

But don't think the design is just about looking good. Built to optimize heat dissipation so that it can operate without a fan, the drive is also designed for convenience and portability. At just 4.6 x 1.8 x 7.6 inches (WxHxD) and weighing barely two pounds, it can be easily transported into your briefcase, allowing you to shuttle files between your home and office, or move your work between your laptop and desktop with ease.

More Space for More Media
With 500 GB of disk space, the LaCie Desktop Hard Disk lets you store up to 35 hours of DV video or 125,000 songs or 550,000 photos. Instead of having all this data stored on an internal drive on your desktop computer that can't be moved around, imagine being able to carry your entire digital media collection with you on your travels. You can also use the drive to back up your computer files for extra security.

Fast Performance and Exceptional Compatibility
With three connection interfaces, you'll be able to get the hard drive up and running quickly with your computer at home, your laptop at work, and just about any computer you need to connect to. The eSATA interface allows for a blistering 1.5 Gbps data transfer speed, perfect for video editing and other intensive work. FireWire 400 is also supported, which has long been a favorite of Mac users and provides 400 Mbps speeds. The nearly universal USB 2.0 interface is supported as well, and offers a transfer rate of up to 480 Mbps.

The LaCie Hard Disk works with both Macs and PCs and is simple to setup. It's plug and play and offers automatic formatting with LaCie Setup Assistant with customizable features. The hard disk features a rotational speed of 7200 RPM and has a cache of at least 8 MB, providing performance that won't keep you waiting for your files to backup or your media to play.

The drive is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, and Vista, as well as Mac OS 10.3 or higher. Included in the box is LaCie's 1-Click Backup Software (Windows and Mac), as well as LaCie SilverKeeper Backup Software (Mac) making backups an easy and painless process.

Free One-Year Unlimited Backup Service
With the purchase of this LaCie Hard Disk, you will also receive a full year of LaCie's Online Backup service. With this service, the data that you store on your computer will be encrypted twice and uploaded to the offsite data center where they will remain encrypted, maintaining your privacy.

When you sign up for the service, software is added to your computer that looks for new and changed files to update. The service is completely automated and only backs up new and modified files when your computer is idle, so you don't have to do a thing, and your computer's performance will never be affected.

This service lets you upload an unlimited amount of photos, music, video, and documents for a full year. After that you can continue with the service for a low monthly fee. This is LaCie's way of ensuring that should anything happen to your Hard Disk -- should it get stolen or damaged, for instance -- your invaluable data will remain completely protected and accessible.

The LaCie 500 GB eSATA/FireWire 400/USB 2.0 Hard Disk, Design by Neil Poulton is backed by a 2-year limited warranty.

About LaCie
Established in France in 1989, LaCie is a leading manufacturer of computer peripherals for Windows, Apple and Linux users. With offices and plants in the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Europe, Singapore and Hong Kong, LaCie develops and manufactures external storage solutions and color monitors that help professionals and everyday people easily manage their digital lives. LaCie has differentiated its products through original designs and leading-edge technology.

What's in the Box
LaCie hard disk, USB 2.0 cable, eSATA cable, FireWire 400 cable, external power supply, quick install guide, LaCie utilities (preloaded on drive), user's manual, backup software.


Product Description
The efficient 500GB LaCie Hard Disk, Designed by Neil Poulton, is extremely easy to use. Very compact for its colossal capacity, this lightweight storage solution moves around easily. Plug & play offering automatic formatting with LaCie Setup Assistant with customizable features. LaCie ‘1-Click’ Backup Software for PC and Mac users is also included for quickly saving files in one click. Created exclusively for LaCie by world-famous designer Neil Poulton, the LaCie Hard Disk’s one-of-a-kind, subtle all-black design blends perfectly into your setup. Adding sophisticated style to your desktop, it has a fashionable, mirror-polished finish and a distinguishing feature - a cool, blue LED strip on its underside that creates an ambient glow. With USB 2.0, eSATA and FireWire 400, the LaCie Hard Disk is designed to connect to any PC or Mac. The widely used interface USB 2.0 offers cross-platform convenience and hot-pluggable connection. For speed-demanding professional applications, eSATA offers an impressively fast transfer rate of up to 80MB/s. There are two FireWire ports so you can connect it to your computer and to another device like a second external drive, camcorder or camera. Even use it as a reliable data shuttle across platforms. Easily share and exchange your files and regularly back up your system or upgrade capacity when your hard drive is full. You can also conveniently save all of your digital photos, music files and videos in one central location for safekeeping.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

88 of 95 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Drive! Support your local midgets!, July 14, 2008

By	Redemptionsong (Short Hills, New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews

I could write a short book explaining away all the novices who trash technology and whine about hard drives with nonsensical bad reviews (not applicable if one actually makes sense lol)... but here it is summed up: this is a great drive. That being said, as with any drive (internal or external) it's technology which means humans built it which means they will crash or come DOA.

External drives have also become extremely popular over the past 4-5 years so the sheer spike in volume of the number produced and sold has exponentially skyrocketed. More devices out there = higher chance / percentage of your failure group.

Now that is not to say there are not particular drive mfg's you would like to avoid & others you would prefer to use. There are, and that is true. LaCie is widely considered one of the high end manufacturers, and this drive is fantastic. Well designed, surprisingly quiet, and with connectivity choices such as USB 2.0 HS, eSATA & Fire Wire it can function fast for even the most demanding power user moving huge chunks of data.

The fact that it's a "Neil Poulton" design is... well, of no consequence really - it's irrelevant overall. However, the unit truly is very slick looking, with a shiny black piano type finish and bright blue LED underneath - it does look nice. They even give you a special cleaning rag for the unit, one that is designed not to scratch it when you wipe it clean of dust - imagine that.

I have 2 of these drives - one 500gig with 16mb cache, the other 1TB with 32mb Cache. In total, 500gig, 750gig, 1TB & 2TB are offered by Lacie in this line, all at 7200 rpm with either 16mb or 32mb cache (contingent on when the unit was built and which model of drives they had in manufacturing at the time). That being said, however, you'll find the new refreshed models coming with 32mb cache.

It is fast and runs quiet and cool. I have 4 LaCie's in total (2 Quadra's as well), and they've all come equipped with Hitachi drives - which are excellent drives. This drive has become one of my favorites (if such a thing is possible...I guess I mean it's the one I worry about the least whenever using, handling or moving it) and I've had at least 9 or 10 external drives over the past 5 years.

The one thing I feel pertinent to add is that this drive is encased in a high grade plastic - it's not cheap feeling or even necessarily "plastic" feeling. However, it's still plastic. This means it comes with plastic's inherent short coming of being unable to dissipate heat nearly as well as metal. I mention that for this reason: if you know the area you plan to use this drive is small, such as a drawer/cabinet or cluttered shelf, or you have plans to stack them, or the room is not well ventilated, I recommend you look towards LaCie's Quadra line of drives.

These drives, when left uncovered & used as a stand alone drive in a typical ventilated / climate controlled home room, can be left on 24x7 & will run to only slightly warm. They do remain cool. However, they will get very hot when items are placed on them (other drives stacked on them, papers, etc) and run for hours at a time.

Great drive, looks slick, performs great & offers multiple connectivity options. It runs cool and quiet. Another HUGE bonus is that the drive comes with cables for eSATA, USB 2.0 HS & FireWire. That saves you a nice chunk of money and the hassle of having to get them yourself. Cool that they do that, it's not typical.

Just remember though that it's technology and they're built by the millions, so it's very possible you just may get one that's DOA or one that fails. It is what it is. Good thing is LaCie provides a 2 year warranty (or 3, contingent on the model), and with drives...typically if they are going to fail they will do it either immediately or in the first 6 - 18 months.

Note: If you have an eSATA connection, use it. You will absolutely LOVE it: 50-60 mbs/sec transfer rate!

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Works well but a little noisy, September 26, 2008

By	rowdoc (Stockton, CA USA) - See all my reviews

I grew out of space to store my videos and captured footage. I bought this large capacity drive to solve that problem, and it has worked.

It was very easy to install on my desktop Mac. It has worked flawlessly out of the box, and the price was very competitive. I have used it for about one month so far.

I read reviews which told me that it was a little noisy and I thought that this would not bother me. I agree that the noise is not loud. It is a mild continuous background hum. But I was wrong.... It does get to me. The noise never goes away, and is the only drawback to this neat, small footprint, shiny black repository of huge amounts of data.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb Shiny / Black Box, May 22, 2008

By	B. Blue "Home" (School) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The previous reviewer obviously hates this HDD, but maybe the reviewer should hate Windows! Before purchasing I researched this HDD up and down on the internet (majority of people LOVE IT!)

I'm one who loves this external hard drive right out of the box! Thanks to Amazon's great price and cheap next day shipping I received this item and in 90 minutes I have everything formatted and almost everything transfered to the drive! I am not sure if it's Mac's simplicity, the HDD's dumb-proof design, or both working perfect together!

I am by no means a power user when it comes to external HDDs. I am using this for my PS3 and Mac, it works perfectly with both!

As it transfers my files now I cannot hear it, speeds are fine, and it looks perfect next to my black shiny ps3!

I highly recommend buying this if you're a casual computer/media junky. I can't say how well it will work in a server room in your business.