Customer Reviews

LaCie F.A. Porsche 320 GB External Hard Drive

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

It's no use to predict how a hard drive will perform down the road past three months of course, and by the time you read the 'down the road' reviews, it'll likely be undersized for your needs.

Regardless, this is a nice plug and play (no drivers needed, literally plug in and go on XP) drive with more than enough room to back up most peoples complete machines with 300gb+ of usable space. I reformatted it to NTFS w/o problem. It's a Hitachi drive; they've been very reliable in my experience. I'm using it to back up both my home server and laptop with room to spare. It's USB 2.0 only, so would be slow for everyday access use. It's the perfect backup drive though for now.

An update (7/7/07): This drive is still working flawlessly nine months in, and I'm still as happy with it as when I wrote the above review.

My original review is at the bottom. Here's my post-failure update:

LaCie sent me a new power adapter for the drive, no charge because the drive was still under warranty. The drive miraculously came back to life and stopped clicking. Their customer service was quick to respond to the problem. Again, the weakest link on this product literally seems to be the power supply and its weak connection to the drive.

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My original review is below. The drive worked well for about six months of light to moderate use. I never transported it, and I kept it in a well ventilated area. My reward? A metal brick. Tonight the drive made a horrible noise and the light on the front started flashing. Uh oh. The motor won't spin up. I'm kissing hundreds of hours of effort ripping backup copies of my CDs goodbye. I'll update this review again once I finish my customer service experience with LaCie -- the drive is still under warranty.

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I picked up a LaCie external 320GB drive lately, and it is working well. I have two Western Digital external drives, and both have served well. This drive was on a special at a local store -- under one hundred dollars -- so I couldn't pass it up.

This LaCie has a much smaller form factor than either WD drive.

It doesn't run too hot: after reformatting it to NTFS, it was only lukewarm. Not bad. For the most part, it feels well made.

It identifies on my Win XP Pro system as a Seagate 320GB drive. Seagate makes some decent hard drives, so if that's what LaCie has in this unit, it's a great deal.

It's quiet. There is a faint hum, but I've never heard a hard drive that is quieter.

The only thing I'd change is LaCie's proprietary power cord/plug. It doesn't feel that snug in the back of the drive. That's a minor quibble, though.

Nothing fancy about the design of this USB drive, but the performance is excellent. I've had mine in operation for over a year now, ever since the other brand (the unnamed ones who make zip drives) crapped out on me in just a few months, and lost nearly 250 meg of fansubbed anime.

When I bought my computer in 2005, I had no way of knowing that twin 160 Gig hard drives was not enought these days. After all my Win98 machine had been going for 7 years, and it only had 15 Gig of space. You quickly find out that with DVR's for media center, music (which I don't personally download) and video's for anime, tv programs, or just fun take up massive amounts of drive space. A good USB drive is needed, and so far so good with the LaCie.

The LaCie is easy to use and connect, very quiet and efficient, gives off little heat, and as you can see, looks just like a retangular metal brick. It has endured my overnight downloading, and watching and deleting videos for over a year now with no complaints. Sometimes USB HD's have problems if not spun down in a computer shutdown. This one never has any problem. On several occasions due to storms or computer glitches, the computer has reboot, even with the download bit torrent client running, the LaCie does not loose it's reference at all and comes back accurately when the system is brought back up, that's another thing my other unit couldn't do all the time.

I believe this drive is the perfect solution if you want to add one of those new digital tuners to your PC. 320 Gig is enough for even a lot of HD programs, and enough for hundreds of non-HD stuff. While I don't have an HD tuner, so I can't personally verify this, my experience with high grade avi files and divx files tells me you should be able to download and watch on this unit at the same time. The only problem comes if you are running too many downloads, but even there I believe the processor becomes the bottleneck, not the LaCie.

What's to say? It holds lots of data and it looks nice on the desk.

A few comments, though, are worth making:

1. It has a separate power supply. The other USB drives I have get power from the USB port on my computer. Adding this drive made me exceed the number of plugs on my power strip and made me find a place for the power brick, which is slightly larger than the power supply on my Lenovo laptop. This also means that you have to remember to turn it off separately from the PC.

2. It gets pretty warm. Since I use it primarily for backup of my computers, this is not a problem. I just turn it off when the backup is finished.

3. I wish the USB cable were a little longer. It's about 18" total, and my desk arrangement is such that a longer cord would have made for more convenient placement.

4. There's a power button on the back. I'd have preferred it on the front. Maybe Porsche Design wanted a smoother look. The only thing on the front panel is a tiny in-use LED.

5. The backup software that comes with it is a pain to use. Fortunately for me, I have BounceBack Pro that came with a CMS drive that I bought last year. Just remember that BounceBack formats the drive the first time you make a backup.

6. The drive is very good looking - about the size of a paperback book with a stainless steel finish.

7. Price - about $100 for 320GB - is a bargain. I suppose prices will continue to fall, but I figured I was waiting myself into never having one, so I bought now.

In summary, I can recommend this product with confidence.

I guess it is naive, and maybe everyone already knows this, but just in case I thought I'd drop a line to say that it works fine to back up all my stuff even though it shows up as MS DOS (that scares me) and I have a laptop with OS X.

It kind of freaks me out that it says MS DOS, and that might turn Mac people off, but I bought this unit because I heard good things from my Mac-only friends.

I dumped 700 images, 300 papers and about 4000 mp3s onto this thing and I still have tons of room for more stuff.

PLEASE READ!
So i had this drive for a little over 3 years and was happy with it. It worked like a charm.
UNTIL, last week when I bought a new computer. I decided to move ALL my data on to the external Lacie drive before I copy it on to my new system. The worst thing happened.. it DIED!!! After moving 100 gigs from my old system it started to make a faint clicking sound. I stomach sank. All my work, photos, emails was on this drive. I didnt hesitate to send it to DriveCrash data recovery.. paid $2500 for them to try to recover it. I got 10% of my data back. This is the worst thing that could have happened. They told me it was common with Lacie porsche drives because there is NO FAN!?! The internal drive is also a Maxtor drive.. the worst drive on the market.
So my advice to current owners is to make sure you have a backup to this Lacie drive. My advice to buyers is DONT BUY THIS DRIVE! Please please please learn from my mistake.

LaCie has been one of my most favorite brands, since I have done numerous Lab reimaging annually and they keep on going. If you do not have a backup of your data, get this NOW and do it. Lately I've seen 15+ drive failures (clickers and screechers) at work, Dell, hp/compact, gateway, all the same ... None of the owners had a backup. Drives must be reaching their MTTF (Mean Time To Failure).

The drive has been working well so far and is part of my backup (S)torage (A)rea (N)etwork. Works well under windows & linux ~[Ubuntu].

There might be bigger drivers for the same price, but don't be coaxed by it.

-TLU student

I admittedly bought this particular drive because I needed something that would look good sitting in my living room. I use it to backup several laptops in my home. I used it at most 2 times a month over its life. I never moved it from the living room. It was never dropped or put in harm's way. Yet, conveniently just out of warranty, it has completely stopped working. The drive fails to be recognized by any OS (Vista, XP, OSX). There's a light clicking sound inside.

The customer service offered to let me buy a new power supply from Lacie at $30+shipping (more than 1/3 of what I paid for the drive) and "see if that works" but that was the extent of their help as the drive is out of warranty after one year.

In my opinion, a one year warranty on a backup drive is not acceptable. A backup drive is less frequently used than a regular hard drive, and hard drives typically carry 2-3 year warranties. It is particularly unacceptable when the company clearly has an inherent issue with their power cables.

I won't be buying the power cable, nor another LaCie product. My advice to the reader is to look to the known disk drive companies (Maxtor, WD, etc.) rather than trusting LaCie.

I bought this hard drive after researching a few different ones. This is by far the best price and best hard drive around. I have had Zero problems with this one. I am a newbie so to speak and bought it to put my music and a few games, pics etc. Lifesaver for my little laptop hard drive. A must for people who need a lot of extra space for little money. You plug it in and that is it.

unlike most tech gadgets that are a little outdated, this product stands in nearly every aspect. The sleek, supreme design by F.A. Porsche makes this product appearance timeless, and its preformance is outstanding, more effective in this model than its smaller, slower (80Gb, 120 Gb) counterparts. The autostart is a little slow for me (its the USB model, not firewire, remeber), but is a totally acceptable feature for the price, design & performance cost-benefit equilibrium. Excellent purchase.