FireWire/i.LINK 800, FireWire/i.LINK 400, USB 2.0 - 7200 rpm - 8 MB Buffer - MPN: 300790U
Strengths: Speed, space, physical look
Weakness: Can be noisy
I haven't had much experience with external hard drives, but this unit does everything I could want and more. Super fast, plenty of room, and looks pretty good -- especially the blue light. My only gripe being that the little blue button sometimes vibrates when the drive is on, producing quite a bit of noise. If you touch the button, it stops vibrating, sometimes until the next time it starts up. However, I imagine this is probably just a one-off problem, and trivial on the scale of potential problems. Because this is the first external hard drive that I've owned, and therefore I have nothing to compare it to, I can't put "one of the best - highly recommend"; although I'm sure it is. So "very good - would purchase again" will have to do.
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TopStrengths: great looking, excellent box design
Weakness: reliability, quality
I work for a design firm and we bought about 10 of these drives over the past year or two, nearly all of them have failed. I thought it could be due to mulitple users, heavy workload or general misuse. Well, unfortunately, the LaCie 250gig drive I bought for home use died as well. I used it solely for music, 3 to 4 time a week, well taken care of, sat on a shelf, adequate ventilation, very light use. This was the second time in three months that it died. The first time, I reformatted the drive and it worked. This time I wasn't so lucky, the drive just died. No disc utility could repair it. I was cautious of these drives from my experience at work so everything was backed up. But I will never buy another product from LaCie, we switched to another manufacturer at work and we have had no problems.
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Tophi,
it nice that you share a bad experience with people to help them.
since the new company you switched to is so good why don't you mention their name as well?
thanks.
Wow, I wish you'd tell us which hard drive you are now using successfully. I have had terrible luck with external drive. My Fantom has given me nothing but problems and need to replace it.
Seems like in this day and age, buying nearly anything manufactured for computers is a crap shoot. I have a 100% success rate with Apple products, but they don't make external hard drives. At my business, we now make our external hard drives. We buy empty boxes from and fill them with Seagate drives. Buying drives from Lacie or Maxtor or EzQuest, I've been told that they use any number of drive manufacturers and the QC isn't consistent. That said, I've had an EzQuest drive for the past 6 - 8 years... seems like for ever, and it's never failed me (yet) and I use it nearly every day. When I search on the type of drive in it, it says indigita. We haven't had the rate of failure we had with the Lacie's since we started assembling our own drives. That's all I have to go on.
Strengths: Solid Case
Weakness: Enclosure's electronics prone to failure, poor service after the sale.
I really liked this drive but had two problems that resulted in loss of data. The first occurred as a result being disconnected improperly because my Dell laptop got hung up. Data recovery utilities recovered some of my files but it was messy. The latest problem rendered the enclosure unusable and there was no apparent cause of the failure. I was able to get files off of the drive by connecting it internally to a friend's desktop computer, but enclosure will no longer power up. I traced this down to problems with the enclosure's circuit boards which LaCie refuses to fix because the drive is out of warranty (just barely). The recommendation I got from LaCie Tech support was to buy a new enclosure from another vendor.
My recommendation to you is to save yourself a step, leave Lacie out of the loop and buy your external drive from another vendor. If you insist on getting a Lacie drive, I advise you to be very careful when disconnecting it, because hotswapping does not appear to be one of this drive's strong suites.
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TopStrengths: This was very easy to use out of the box. Even came with instructions on how to install everything even if it seems obvious. Manual is very helpful and written well.
Weakness: None
I got this hard drive after much research and seeing my friend use it for about a year. He has had no problems with it and it has saved his butt a couple of times. Its simple and works well!
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TopStrengths: Fast, quiet, versatile, reliable (so far!)
Weakness: None
Mine is working great and is very quiet. I use it in audio recording, where noise would be quite noticeable. It runs reasonably cool too, even when streaming massive quantities of audio data. It is used every day in a professional setting.
The guy who messed his up "hot swapping" needs to know that you must dismount the drive before yanking out the firewire cable. Also, if the directory got messed up when his laptop hung, it's not the drives fault. Still, it wouldn't have hurt LaCie to help him out.
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TopStrengths: Very large hard drive!!! Transfers fast through firewire...
Weakness: Can be noisy through transfer. Vibrates alot of sound.
I would recommend this to anyone. I really like the drive. It was a little hard to set up using Windows XP. I has a little problem. They need to do something that limits the drive sound.
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TopStrengths: Solid Aluminum case, Multiple connection capability, Cool-looking design
Weakness: Seems a litte hot.
I've been using this drive for about a year now. I've never been able to get it to mount using the USB connection but that might be a limitation of my system (haven't bothered to look). I use the Firewire 400 connection exclusively.
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TopStrengths: Looks Kind Of Nice
Weakness: Reliability
I bought one of these hard drives to back up my digital pictures which I have been taking over the past 5 years. Installation was fine, fairly straight forward (I was using the firewire connection) No major complaints other than being a bit noisy.
Just after a year the drive died. Just quit. I was not able to connect/browse and a slight ticking sound was audible coming from the unit. Also, you could not hear that familiar "whirl" sound which comes from a normal spinning HD. Called LaCie and was told that since the unit was no longer under warranty (by a whole 3 weeks) I was out of luck.
I tried another external PS, no help. Since I had nothing to lose I tore the unit apart, removed the HD (it was a WD Caviar IDE) and installed it internally in my PC. Luckily it worked and I was able to save my data. I assume, since it was not the HD itself nor the PS, it was something with the interface brd inside the enclosure.
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TopStrengths: Aluminum case, fanless design, multiple interfaces, fast transfer rate and backup software.
Weakness: Only one firewire 400 port.
This drive has been a solid performer for almost two years. Multiple interfaces makes this product easy to move between my mulitple machines. Their Mac backup software, silverkeeper, is pretty easy to use. The tech support team promptly answered pre-sales e-mails.
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TopStrengths: Nice, sleek look, high quality aluminum case, quiet compared to some enclosures
Weakness: Drive enclosure electronics failed after relatively light use
I had only used my Lacie d2 250 maybe a dozen times, mostly just to backup files from my laptop, and I always treated the drive very well. About 3 months past the 1-year warranty, the drive simply failed. It would power on, but MAC powerbook couldn't see the drive anymore, on either the USB 2.0 or on the Firewire 400 ports. My WinXP workstation couldn't see it either. I even purchased a new power adapter from Lacie on the outside chance that was what failed, but no dice.
Since it was out of warranty, I took the enclosure apart and tested the Maxtor hard drive. It turns out it wasn't a total loss, since the Maxtor 250GB HD was fine. I just purchased another drive enclosure for $40 and that one works.
I personally will not be buying this brand again.
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TopStrengths: streamlined design. includes cables for just about any setup.
Weakness: easy start card describes a/c & cable setup with computer, but full instructions included only on cd, not in booklet form.
instructions to setup regular backups are lengthy and not particularly easy to use for a beginner. instructions should take user through the various choices of backup systems in a more organized way... ie: if you use more than one operating system, you should use this method..... etc. Recently, I had to turn off the external hard drive because it kept causing my mac to crash and then I couldn't get system to start up. Hopefully, I will be able to fix this glitch. I am currently on OS 9.2 but plan to install OS 10.4 and would like to switch back & forth as necessary to use older programs. From my research, I'm sure this is one of the better external hard drives available, but everything is not explained as simply as it could be.
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TopStrengths: form and function
Weakness: power brick and bright blue light
I've had my drive for almost three years and have had no problems. I hope I'm not jinxing myself by writing this. :) The only thing I really don't like is the bright blue light. If your comp is in your bedroom you'll have to put tape over it.
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TopStrengths: Large capacity, wakes up and sleeps with your computer.
Weakness: See my comments.
This is my second, and last, LaCie product. I had a smaller drive from LaCie that died and then I bought this one to replace it. Now I have two dead drives. I used it according to every specification they give out in the manual - it sat on my desk, nothing stacked on it, lots of ventilation room and I used it lightly to store backups of graphics files. First the directory got corrupted, then it started making clicking noises, now it won't even spin up. This is a mechanical failure identical to my for LaCie drive too.
By the way, I used a prodcut called Disk Warrior to repair the directory so I could back up as much stuff off of it before it really died.
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TopStrengths: Connections to computer. 2 Fw800 ports, 1 Fw400 port, 1 USB 2.0 port
Weakness: I've never liked power bricks. At least this one has a normal AC plug at the end.
Drive casing well built - solid feel to this unit. Heavy duty aluminum case. I mounted mine vertically using the stand provided. You could mount the unit lying flat on the side if you wanted to stack one or more, it comes with rubber bumpers to isolate vibration and provide some clearance. Easy to understand directions. Took less than 5 minutes to assemble plug in and turn on. The drive showed up upon start-up ready to go. I'm running this on a G-4 Mac with OSX software so the drive is set-up and mounts on the desktop automatically. The directions for re-formatting the drive for a Windows box look simple enough, although of course I didn't have to do this. Runing well and nearly filled up after 3 weeks. I run a video production company so I use a lot of drives and space.
Overall a good value.
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TopI've had loads of these drives and now I have cupboards full of metal D2 junk. They fail very easily.
Be Careful
Strengths: Nice design
Weakness: Drive failure is almost guaranteed
I did a lot of research when choosing a new FireWire 800 external drive, and it came down to an Iomega drive and this LaCie model. I went with the LaCie model despite reviews at the Apple Store and on Amazon.com that bemoaned this drive's failure rates and poor support.
Well, I made a mistake.
Within 16 hours of plugging this thing in, in the middle of my first backup, sitting on a shelf, this drive decided to make the most hideous of grinding noises and then abruptly crash. Now, it goes completely unrecognized by my PowerBook and makes a nasty scraping sound whenever it's powered on.
Needless to say, I'm returning this piece of junk and going with an OWC Mercury Elite FW800/400 external drive. I've heard good things.
My advice: stay away from this manufacturer. It seems like wherever one looks, it's always the same reports: drive failure, drive failure, drive failure.
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