Customer Reviews

LaCie 160GB Firewire Desktop External Hard Drive ( 300702U ) P3 design by FA Porsche

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

The world of firewire drives for the Mac is not a happy world. LaCie's 250GB Porsche enclosure/drive has received awful reviews, for example. In my own experience I've recently tried and returned TWO enclosures for a 200 GB Maxtor. My subsequent research has found bad experiences with every vendor, save perhaps WeibeTech.

Of all the enclosures and drives I've tried, this one, borrowed from a friend, worked best. I may buy it, but I would NOT buy the 250 GB relative for any price. The reviews of that drive are uniformly negative.

Here's the fundamental problem:

1. USB 2 and Firewire 400 were in competition for a few years. USB 2.0 won.
2. Only owners of older Macs need a Firewire 400 drive, owners of newer Macs will usually go for a USB 2 drive.
3. The Firewire spec is very demanding. Most Macs and most enclosures don't really meet the specs -- but they fall short in different ways.
4. Various point releases of OS X have broken firewire support in different ways.
5. Different drives in the same enclosures yield different results.
6. Different cables produce different results, the best cables are expensive.

This is how to test:

1. Check heat. Run the drive hard for hours. Does the enclosure get too hot to hold? I had one drive almost melt the enclosure.
2. Check drive transfers. Transfer 100 GB of data. Does it work?
3. Dismount the drive and unplug. Plug again. Repeat. Does the drive mount and dismount?
4. Mount the drive. Put your machine to sleep. Awaken it. Does the drive spin up on request?
5. If you have an iPod, try it daisy chained with the drive. Can you mount, dismount? Does iTunes work? (Note however, iTunes may have trouble with any music library stored on an external drive, this appears to be an iTunes bug.)

Only the LaCie 160 passed all 4 tests on my iBook dual USB running 10.3.5. Two other enclosure/drive pairs failed.

So it may not be great, but it may be "better than the rest".

PS. I read a review here that said: "The drive is very stylish. Tried it on MAC panther OS, EXTREMELY slow, compared to my other LaCie d2 drive, also if it comes across anything it doesnt like (file name too long, unrecognized symbol) just quits copying. This product is practically useless but will be a nice stylish accessory for your retro office."

I wonder if that reviewer had the drive formatted as FAT32. A FAT32 formatted drive will display the problems he experienced. All he would have to do is use OS X Disk Utility software to reformat as HFS+. Unless you have very particular reasons, you should make sure the drive is HFS+ formatted.

This drive worked right out of the box without a single "hitch." I did reformat to HFS (Mac OS extended) before moving files but would have most certainly done this to any new drive. It quietly and quickly accepted the 40 gigs I dumped onto it only seconds after plugging it in/formatting. I read the other reviews for this drive and was a bit hesitant to purchase it. Maybe the problems are Windows related? I'm running OS X Panther on a Power Mac G4.
It is running a bit warm after several hours but then so does a large-capacity internal drive. I'm not worried.
As for the design, I was at first turned off by it's stark minimalism and suspected that it would feel cheap; flimsy, dent-able, scratch-able metal. I was pleasantly surprised when I opened the box. It does not feel or look cheap and the metal casing is sturdy and MUCH more attractive than I had imagined. The body is matte and the face has a shinier brushed appearance.
I was skeptical when ordering this drive but did so mainly because I have had nothing but good luck with Lacie products. This drive is no exception.
I highly recommend.

Mac users: first thing you should do is reformat the drive as an HFS+ volume using Disk Utility. This will allow you to use unicode characters in your filenames, a must if you'll use the disk as a volume for iTunes. This is a bit annoying since Mac users really seem to be the target demographic for this drive.

But once that's out of the way, the drive works great. Its clean, minimalist design is a perfect compliment to the Powerbook it sits next to, and it spins down to be near silent when I'm it's not being accessed. Exactly what I wanted in a drive.

Bought this for iMac G4 running OS X Panther. Works great. Everything I could ask for.

I am pleased with this drive, which was easily formated following the instructions for my Mac G4 OS 10.2. It is exceedingly quiet and efficient. I transferred about 5 GB of song files in a couple of minutes and then had them playing back on iTunes. The automatic back up is also useful, since it backs up my docs every night at 1 a.m. Don't see any downside ... so far.

From reading the reviews, it seems that the majority of complaints come from Windows users.

I can't speak for them, but on my iBook, I plugged it in, reformatted within a few seconds in HFS+ as recommended for OS X. I then installed OS X on the LaCie and booted off the external drive with no problems. It makes a perfect rescue drive in case something happens to your internal drive.

The drive runs warm which is normal, but never gets hot, even when left running for the day. Results may vary depending on how disk intensive the apps you're running are.

Update: So it is now some years later, and I have been using LaCie drives still, first the 20GB Rugged Drive when it was a plain blue rubber band around the housing, and recently, the 120GB Rugged Drive with the Orange rubber band on the metal housing, and I have to say, these two drives have been relaible and first rate--through a LOT of use, so the issues with the FireWire Bridges may have been seen-to, or I may have had a one-off, though to judge from the email traffic, it was 6 times the sigma...

...anyway I am using the FireWire 800 on these new(er) drives and it B L A Z E S, like FAST, folks!

Original Review: I am a longtime user of LaCie products, having been enticed firstly by the attractive D2 casing. In every case, the completion of my music collection is the signal for the drive to fail--aggrivating, certainly. I tried wonderful symantec recovery products, but I found after much research that what happens is that the firewire bridge burns out--this is largely due to the constant back and forth traffic using music programs like iTunes. A new firewire bridge costs about 149 dollars, but you can actually open the drive housing and put the physical, naked drive into a new housing--these run from 9-14 dollars brand new on most sites. I did this with mine, and was able to recognize the HFS+ volume again, just as if nothing had happened! The drives are good quality, but whoever supplies LaCie with their firewire bridges is obviously not a first-rate manufacturer. I hope this helps, because I know first hand how dumbstiking it is to lose so much data without apparent cause.

The drive worked totally fine one day, and after 3 hours or so it was rejected by various macintosh computers.
It started making mechanical noises and after using every means possible I could only recover 8 GB worth of data.

I'm a student where many people in our department were recommended to purchase this particular model, and I don't know a single person who didn't have the same experience with it.
Don't buy it if you want to keep your data in this for more than a year.

This drive is very unreliable on both Windows XP Pro and Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 for me. My coworker bought the same drive at the same time as me and he has the same problems. Tons of disk errors. I will never buy another Lacie product. I can't believe they have a good reputation among Mac users if they sell products like this.

I wish I had returned it while it was still under warranty.

I've had the 160GB USB drive for less than a year. I copied years of home video onto it... and you know the rest. I came home and it is suddenly empty. I can save new files to it but none of my video files are there. Lacie tech support said to try scan disk or a 3rd party undelete product or hire a data recovery firm, which appear to want about $600 to work on it!

Not good...