Customer Reviews

LaCie Rugged XL 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive 301848U

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

The drive works fine, as expected. No problems at all. However, being a big fan of the smaller 2.5" rugged drives, I bought this sight unseen without reading the description. Turns out it's a 3.5" drive in a much larger enclosure that looks exactly like the smaller ones in a picture but is actually much larger. I'm an admitted bonehead, so it's my fault but I'm taking off a star for the drive looking exactly like the smaller version that has become a bit of a standard around Hollywood.

Also, there's now no express card slots in the new MacBook Pros, so you can't use esata at all. Not a good drive if you're looking to use it with a new Macbook Pro.

Strong, Easy to use and fast, faster when use eSATA. I use for my photo editions in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom 2.5. I do thousands of Wedding and Engagement photos, after work I put everything on this HDD. Is perfect combine with my Mac Book Pro. I recommend.
[...]

I never write reviews because things usually work! I used this drive twice and it failed COMPLETELY on the 2nd job. Luckily the footage we shot was backed up on another drive or we would be dead in the water. Wish I could recommend this drive (have 4 of the 500GB rugged drives which seem to perform better) but buyer beware. They look cool but can't say the same for performance.

I purchased this drive with 1TB capacity & eSATA interface in June of 2010. I'm a DJ & digital media producer. I use both a MacBook Pro w/NTFS for Mac and a Sony Vaio notebook w/Windows Vista to access my media project library (900 GB of audio, video & photo files) stored on the LaCie Rugged XL. The eSATA connection was super fast and allowed non-latency editing of A/V projects directly to the drive. While I have kept the drive 'on' most of the time in the last 8 months, I have packed it up a few times to bring to clients'.

I also have two other LaCie external hard drives: [500GB LaCie Big Disk Extreme w/Triple Interface] & [1TB LaCie Hard Disk by Neil Poulton w/eSATA, Firewire & USB] Both drives had a 2 year warranty. Both served me well during the first year. Soon after at 13 months, the power supply of the Big Disk Extreme failed but LaCie kindly sent me a replacement along w/a RMA & FedEx return label for returning the defective part. Then, after 15 months of sedentary backup storage use, the 1TB Hard Disk failed. LaCie instructed me to ship the defective drive to them at my own cost for repair or refurbished replacement which seemed cheap on their part but I complied. 10 days later I received a refurbished replacement drive. This one similarly failed 10 months later and because the original failed hard drive was purchased 25 months ago, LaCie refused to honor the 2-year warranty on the refurbished which didn't seem right.

8 weeks ago while running a backup of the LaCie Rugged XL (one hour before departing on a 6-week trip abroad), the drive started making a high-pierced grinding and repetitive clicking noise then the icon vanished from my Desktop. Unable to access it from my laptop, knowing the sound was most likely indicative of an imminent failure and with no time to troubleshoot the issue, I pushed the power button to 'off' and disconnected the eSATA & power cables. 6 weeks later once I returned from my trip, I hooked up my MacBook Pro laptop to the LaCie Rugged XL, connected the power supply, connected the eSATA cable and pushed the power switch to 'on'. Immediately, the drive let out the same grinding & clicking shriek as before. My laptop wasn't able to access it either so I powered it 'off' and immediately sent LaCie a detailed support request via their website's registered product support as it was still under the 2 year warranty period. After 3 days and no response, I sent a 2nd request. After 5 days, I finally received a response informing me that I would have to ship it back to them at my expense and they would either repair it or send me a refurbished one. It was a dreaded deja vu. Its been one week now since I mailed the defective drive back to LaCie. Meanwhile, I've read many negative accounts/reviews (mostly on Amazon.com) about LaCie's less than favorable customer service practices and their increasingly common hard drive failures. Call me old fashioned but when you consider that a hard drive's purpose is to store data (usually of personal or professional value and often confidential and proprietary) I believe the device should have a longer life cycle than the warranty length otherwise the manufacturer should stick an "expiration date" label on it. One the bright side, I have a backup copy of 75% of the data. On the down side, the drive failed while I was running a back up and I lost about 200GB worth of work related files. Like many others have painfully discovered, nowadays the quality and beauty of LaCie hard drives tend to run skin deep.

I really didn't use and the drive failed. Now returning to Amazon. Not happy at all.

I purchase items from Amazon weekly and have never bothered to write a review on anything, but this product and company are so horrible, I felt it was important to share my experience. I purchased this Lacie so-called "rugged" hard drive in May 2011, right before my honeymoon to use as my back up hard drive. It seemed to work fine until one day in October 2011-- not 6 months later, I took the hard drive out of my computer bag to find that the place where the USB cord connected to the hard drive had come out of the drive and was now attached to the plug. I have in no way abused this hard drive either-- it has spent most of it's time just sitting on my desk. I was baffled as to how this "rugged" hard drive would just suddenly fall apart, but it all started to make since once I contacted Lacie (non) customer service. The wait time each time I called was OVER 4 HOURS. On the two occasions where I even bothered to wait to speak to a representative, they told me yes, my product was under warranty, and that I could mail it in and they would repair it free of charge, but that the drive would be wiped clean of all its data and that if I wanted my data recovered (in this case, my honeymoon pictures), it would cost OVER $500 dollars! I was in shock the first time I got off the phone, which is why my husband tried calling again, to see if there was some kind of miscommunication, but no. They actually told him that this sort of thing happens A LOT and that they ALWAYS charge for data recovery regardless of the fact that they produced and sold me a crummy, flimsy, not to mention expensive product no more than 6 months ago. To add insult to injury, this is the second Lacie product that has failed me, so I will NEVER purchase anything from this company again. Their customer service is awful-- and clearly their products create a lot of problems for their customers, or they wouldn't have 4 hours wait times to speak to a customer no-service representative. I strongly advise against doing business with Lacie. I was lucky in that I purchased the hard drive from a good, local electronics and photography store (not amazon), and they are doing their best to recover my data for me free of charge, because they agree that Lacie's handling of the situation was unacceptable. I am going to do my best to make sure that as many people as possible learn what a horrible company Lacie is, and save them from losing time and money trying to recover data from a product that is meant to keep it safe.

I recently got a new laptop with an ESATA port. I use this hard drive to make periodical backups for my computer. My laptop has ~250GB worth of stuff on it, so it saves a lot of frustration for an impatient guy like me when the transfer speed is so high. It's also pretty nice that it has USB compatibility as well. My previous computer was an old clunker from 2001, so it didn't have an ESATA port. When I got the new computer, I was able to use the USB connection to copy the files from the old computer onto the external drive, then use the ESATA connection to transfer that to the new computer (and at a faster speed, to boot.)
My only real complaint about this product? You can't use the ESATA and USB connections at the same time.

Although the drive was purchased in March; we've only been using it for the last three months. Last week the drive failed and we've lost all of the data that was on it. The drive never suffered any 'trauma'; was kept in the same place, same position; just failed. Trying to get 'support' from Lacie is extremely time consuming with them trying to get you to go to every possible 'paid' option for recovery, replacement, etc.; rather than just addressing your problem. I will never purchase a Lacie product again, and have already made sure our support company for IT will not either. Very disappointing.

Easy to set up, works like a charm. FYI it requires you to plug it into the wall socket, not just the USB.

Its a great product as long as you don't need firewire. The design is sturdy and stylin. I wish they made one powered by USB... eliminating cords would great!