Customer Reviews

LaCie Hard Disk 1 TB FireWire 400/USB 2.0/eSATA External Hard Drive, Design by Neil Poulton 301315U

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

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.

I bought this drive to hold all of my video and photo files for my business and wow, its not only a lot of space but the transfer rate is insanely fast. I am actually running programs on this drive as oppose to my internal drive on my comupter. Great buy. great price, great product.

UPDATE: Finally crapped out on me after 3 years! Not a bad drive! May 2011

(That's a good thing!) Have used it as a repository for back-ups (via ShirtPocket's SuperDuper) of 2 internal Mac G4 drives and 1 external firewire drive-- it's still just a few months old-- but it worked efficiently and unobtrusively. The black high-gloss finish reminds me of a beautiful black mirror. Set-up was effortless. All that's needed is for LaCie is to make icons of it available. Bought it from JR Music after it went out of stock with Amazon. No free shipping but it came out cheaper even with shipping.

I have a home rig that's PC-based, but it's not ready to handle HD footage yet... as well as two PC based laptops equipped to do the same. A few months ago, I picked up a MacBook Pro and a deck-based HD camera from Sony (to go along with my two SD cameras and DSLR still cam). Needless to say, when capturing whole tapes (HD and SD), a ton of clips, or huge batches of RAW files, you really start to burn through gigs like they're megabytes from the the 90's (hope that makes sense). I wound up filling my MacBook's HDD up so much that it wasn't able to do it's OS updates.
I picked up the LaCie 1 terabyte drive (with eSATA, FW 400, USB 2.0) and had it installed and ready to roll within 5 minutes of receiving it at work. I've read some concerns that it doesn't have FW 800, but for a $150-170 terabyte drive, you can only expect so much. Since the drive is dedicated to my Mac I haven't used the eSATA connection, but I know for a fact that it's a great connection (speed-wise) for rigs able to accommodate that connection. The only connection I've used is the FW 400 (there are two of these ports), and I've found that transferring roughly 150 gigs over didn't take an excruciatingly long time. I've found the connection to be fast enough to edit SD video- reading and writing to the external drive. There's a bit of lag, but barely enough to notice or have any effect on syncing audio and video.
Design-wise... there's really nothing to say. I didn't seek a hard drive masquerading as art, I was looking for something with a decent rating, a good price, and 1 TB. There's no real design to speak of here... it's a shiny black box the size of a medium-largish print novel, and it has a blue LED that increases and decreases in luminosity as the drive does its job. You can't turn the light off, so if you really hate lights either turn the drive around or put some electrical tape over it. I don't find it distracting, personally. Pretty much everyone has mentioned that this thing collects fingerprints like Chris Hansen collects pedos, and they're all right. There's absolutely no way to handle the case without blemishing it unless you hold it from the bottom and pretend you're a waiter, which is probably not a good idea unless you've actually got the skills of a seasoned professional food service employee. It's too clean to stay clean, so if you have an obsessive compulsive disorder that causes you to make sure everything's spotless, stay away from this product. Personally, I don't care... it's a hard drive. A big fat terabyte of real estate.
If you picked up the Swiss Army backpack with your Mac (the one capable of holding the 17" model), rest assured that this drive will fit in the center pocket of that particular backpack unless you've already crammed that with books or stolen fast food condiments.
So far, the drive has worked flawlessly as both a drive to batch-dump massive amounts of data on, as well as work off of directly (as you would with most video applications, page layout and design apps, presentations, etc).
One brief note... I've read reviews about this drive and its noise or lack thereof. The only time I ever notice a noise on this thing is when I turn it on (there's a brief wind sound up as it starts to spin up), and occasional HDD noises you'd expect when initiating the drive or putting it through its paces in one way or the other. It sounds quiet... err... it barely sounds at all to me. It's about as loud as a hard drive-based laptop (one working well).

I'm connecting two of these drives to a RAID controller to mirror my data through the eSATA connection. The drive has one of the most beautiful enclosures. When they're stack together with the blue LED shining on to each other, it creates quite an artistic feel. For those people who value esthetics, you shouldn't miss this one.

The drive itself is working just as advertised. A drive is a drive. Hasn't failed on me yet.

The only star I took off from the rating is due to the cables that ship with the product. They're so short.

Great little drive, I was pleased by the light weight (weighs half that of my aluminum-cased G-Drive 500GB, but then of course one is going to sacrifice durability), and it's fast enough for my purposes (media storage).

I'm buying my 2nd one today - exact duplicate of the first, simply to back up the first one, and to allow me to remove it, put it in a nice little shock-resistant box I made, and haul my media collection around with me for accessing from the laptop or wherever I go - currently storing a pretty serious collection - over 22,000 music MP3 files, several hundred TV episodes, a handful of HD movies, and about 2,500 podcasts - and room for more.

Several reviewers have written complaining about different makes of drives failing, but I think it's not brand-specific anymore - they're all correct. Buying the first of these two LaCie 1TBs (and these are the sixth and seventh LaCie drives I've bought) was precipitated by a nearly brand-new Seagate Barracuda 1TB - very highly rated by all reviewers and use reviews I'd read - internal failing, and it was my primary drive running my entire business. That nightmare is another story, but my closest tech buddy had the exact same drive die on him two weeks later - serial numbers very different, and each manufactured in a different country - but after having been through the whole rigmarole with repair attempts, Data Rescue, DriveSavers, etc, every hardware technician or engineer I spoke with echoed the same story - that we customers are clamoring for larger and larger drives, and we want them priced them lower and lower.

The truth is these large drives ALL have significantly higher failure rates than the drives of yesteryear - i.e. 80GB, 100, 120 etc. Multiple, stacked platters are a big part of the problem (and part of the reason why DriveSavers wanted $2,900 - yes, that second zero is not a typo - to get the data off of the last dead drive).

Over the years, I've had complete data loss on two Iomegas, two LaCie's, three Western Digitals, three Hitachis (laptop internals), and one Seagate. But that's since 1985, when my IBM-PC had a 10MB hard drive! (which I would guess would still work if you dug it out of whatever landfill it's in). Only drive that seems unstoppable (so far) is that G-Drive (G-Technology), and that's probably because I just haven't owned enough of them, long enough.

For me, the key is redundant backups, and off-site backups - because there are only two kinds of computer users: those who HAVE lost irreplaceable data -- and those who WILL.

Incidentally, LaCie doesn't broadcast this prominently, but their web site claims that any of these drives entitles the purchaser to one year of UNLIMITED offsite backup storage (presumably on to LaCie's in-house servers, don't know as I haven't tried it yet, so I can't review regarding ease of access, upload/download speeds etc).

But overall, my LaCie's have been rugged, reliable and fast enough, and always priced very competitively.

This is a beautiful looking drive. The Neil Poulton design speaks out with clean and sleek looks.
It is glossy black and the blue light is outstanding.
Neither Seagate's nor WD's external drives look so beautiful.

PROS:
1. 1TB is a lot of space - great.
2. Beautiful, sleek design
3. Triple interface - USB, eSATA and Firewire 400 (more on this in a moment).
4. Power button - I like the idea of having a power button on the drive, Seagate does not put one...tis comes in handy.
5. You can make the driv Mac and PC compatible simultaneously using the supplied software by LaCie...it's fairly easy. You're given the option to do so at the time of formatting.
6. LaCie's included software formatted the hard disk in a breeze and I was able to partition it easily using Vista's Computer Management utility.
7. LaCie's give vents at the bottomof the drive which is good as the whole body is made of hard plastic, so the body does not act as a heat sink.

CONS:
1. The glossy black finish looks beautiful but makes the drive a fingerprint magnet.
2. Noisy - this drive is noisy...you will notice the drive starting up and shutting down even if you are 15-20 feet away from it.
3. Firewire 400 cable - This does not work with Vaio's iLink outof the box, you need to buy an adaptor or a 4-pin cable to make it work with those. Well LaCie should specify that the cable will not work with 4-pin Firewire 400 jacks. You can buy a $3-$4 cable from amazon (that's what I did and it works fine) [...]
4. The HDD tends to get a little warm on prolonged usage, vents at the bottom help a lot but still it gets hot as the body is hard plastic.

Other than that an awesome product.

***UPDATE 11/12/2009***: After using this for a while I figured that the read speeds for the firewire interface is definitely more than the usb interface but for write speeds, firewire keeps decreasing (from 45mbps to 9mbps) while usb keeps consistent at about 25 to 30mbps. Can't say if this is an issue with the drive.

***UPDATE 12/28/2009***: I contacted LaCie tech support and they responded promptly to my concern about slow write speeds. They came out saying that its probably because of corrupt file system so I had to delete all partitions and format the HDD. This did not help and after searching some forums, I found that there is a performance setting for external HDDs in Win Vista and 7. After tweaking that, I get 27-28 MB/s consistently via iLink (firewire 400).

Last Christmas, I asked for a TB of memory from my folks (I'm in college with my own computer) and they delivered this item to me on December 25th 2008, and here we are, almost ten months later... not one bit of grief!
To this day, it now holds over 2000 video files including 47 Flash Videos (about 20MBs each) about 2000 TV Episodes (ranging from 180MB to 300MBs) and over 130 movies (1.5-2.1 GBs each) 'with' much more room to spare (I still have about 200 GBs left of space) I'm a film major and I love to have backups of my content for my personal pleasure and this external drive is my basically my happiness. (I don't even watch the main TV anymore) Its very easy and simple to both use and to access whatever content you place on it, especially through the fire-wire port.
For Mac users, it works perfectly fine with both OS Leopard and Snow Leopard... My only suggestion is if you have this hooked up in your room, turn it off at night, because the blue light it emits can be a little bit bright (especially if you are still writing files to it; it will also flash on and off while doing so).

The Lacie 1TB external hard drive is simple and elegant. It runs whisper quiet, so you hardly know it's there. Actual space out of the box is about 945GB, plenty for backing up everything and then some. It has two fire wire connections on the back, so you can connect to multiple PC's simultaneously (one USB and one eSATA also). The included software allows you to make partitions for both your Mac and Windows PC. It's really nice that it came with all the cables, but each is only about 2 feet long. That's my only gripe as this is now the third Lacie drive I've owned, and all are still working perfectly (two 250GB drives have been in regular operation for the past 4 or 5 years). For $150, the 1TB drive is a steal!

I bought my Lacie external hard drive and the disc failed in less than a year. After speaking with a customer representative, I sent it for "testing" to their repair center. Turns out, they simply replaced it and I lost my entire catalogue of iTunes music, as well as photos and other irreplaceable items. All they could give me was a "sorry." Do not trust the quality, and definitely do not assume your data is protected. Learn from my loss, please!