USB 2.0 - 7200 rpm - 8 MB Buffer - MPN: 300728U
Strengths: None
Weakness: All
I have owned 3 LaCie drives, and all have failed, causing me immesurable problems.
This is not a manufacturer who cares about the integrity of their product.
AVOID LaCie, or buy their garbage and face lots of unnecessary problems!!!
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TopStrengths: Worked well before it burned out.
Weakness: It stopped working -- that's a big problem.
I'm not entirely certain why this product failed, but it stopped being recognized by my G5 dual processor (Mac OS X (Panther). I'm not sure if it overheated or what happened. One day it worked (for 6 months) and now my data is lost. Personally, I wouldn't buy this drive again. Once burned is too much for me.
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TopFear not. The same thing happeed to me. I took mine apart and hooked the drive directly to my PC and all my data was still there. It was the USB circuitry that failed. I am going to pick up a standard USB external enclosure from NewEgg for about $25 and should be back in business. I think it is very sensitive to heat.
I have one of these drives and just bought a second. my work place has at least 3 of them left running 24/7 as alternate daily backups.
No problems!
These are basically BACKUP drives, if you are leaving them on 24/7 and doing gaming off one it seems to me you would be heating it up and that would fail just about any external drive I think.
External drives are basically for intermittant, occasional and backup use- they aren't designed to run your entire box or be your video/music drive left on 8 hours a day.
From the couple of failures in reviews I read, it seems the heat killed them (or we as readers will never know if it wasn't a voltage surge, poor surge protector or maybe the drives were dropped by the reviewer's kid and put back on the desk before dad finds out! - unknown to the owner who turns it on later and it doesn't work any more- must have been a bad drive right?
The key to backups is redundancy and duplicity, use a couple of DIFFERENT types and brands of drives or different ages, and duplicate the contents to all of them.
When the internal drive is a couple or 3 years old, pull it, stick it in a box in the closet and install a new drive after cloning all the contents to it.
In my 12 years with computers Ive NEVER had a drive failure and never lost drive contents doing this.
Drives in daily use I hear have a life expectancy of about 3-5 years, so EXPECT the drive you buy today will die by 3-5 years and follow the above protocol and you should be just fine. Drives kept stored unused in the closet in a box should store just fine, ready to be used if the occasion is ever necessary.
I have one of these drives and it has stopped working. i have a usb cable for my printer and i plugged this into the drive but nothing happened.
On closer inspection two of the pins in the power cable have been snapped - the light on the drive displays yellow - any ideas what i can do?
i have too much stuff on the drive to loose it so any ideas would be beneficial.
thanks
Strengths: Firewire, speed, capacity, looks
Weakness: Reliability due to bad thermal design
As soon as I received the drive, I was concerned about the design. As a disk drive designer in the past, it was clear that this sleek packaging did not have a very good thermal design. Within one year, the drive was bad. I wouldn't buy this drive again, rather look for one that provides fan cooling.
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TopStrengths: Easy to install, huge storage, quite cheap and cool looking.
Weakness: The software and the USB cable included.
I am very happy with it. I spent less than $200 for 250Gigabite, you cannot beat that.
In addition, it is small and cool looking.
It comes formatted in FAT32 and with a cd-rom with some software for partitioning or formatting. Unfortunately the software is compatible just with windows 98 or ME, so having XP, I was not able to install it: lame!!!!
Not a big deal, you can use the XP disc manager to do it anyway, but you would expect LaCie to update their software...
The speed seems fair: to backup over 17Giga, it took 28 minutes.
It is quiet, but gets really really hot.
The USB Cable taht comes with is super short and requires your computer and the Hard drive to sit next to each other.
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TopStrengths: Small size and weight, cost per GB
Weakness: fit and finish
I have had 8 external hard drives, including four with removable trays. This drive is very small and light (under 2 lbs), with OK transfer speeds (consistent with USB2 limits -- a little more than 1GB per 90 seconds). The price was extremely low for an external 250 ($176). Contrary to what I read in one of these reviews, it gets warm to the touch, but not HOT like my Maxtor One Touch 250. Quieter than the Maxtor also.
Porsche-design, who cares? The face plate and rear plate leave nice sharp edges exposed. This is pure design carelessness. Fit and finish could easily have been better, making this a near-perfect 5-star drive.
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TopStrengths: Outstanding design and storage for a decent price...
Weakness: Drive get's extremely hot, almost too hot to handle.
I just purchased this drive and so far all is good. The computer instantly recognized it and I backed up my whole computer in around an hour. The drive's design is spectacular and puts my 80GB Maxtor external to shame. The drive looked a lot bigger in the pictures than when I actually saw it for real. Think about a vhs tape slightly thicker and heavier and you've got the idea.
All in all, a great purchase for a great price.
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TopStrengths: Small form factor. Lightweight. Nice looking.
Good small package. Works beautifully right out of the box. It is a great value for the price and it looks better than most other external HDs out there.
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TopStrengths: Great price on a large drive.
I bought this drive because it gave me the cheapest gigabytes/dollar ratio. It sometimes makes a little buzzing noise, but if you just place something on top of the drive it stops.
Make sure you have high speed USB and you'll get reasonable speeds. I copied some files to a friend's machine that was only USB 1.1 and it's slow like mollases.
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TopStrengths: Great value per gigabyte, sleek design, small profile, USB 2.0 connection
Weakness: USB 2.0 is likely slower in transfer than Firewire
Great value for memory.
Wonderfully sleek design and profile -- VHS size, ~ 1 pound.
Slower than expected transfer, but worked right out of the box (with Windows 2000, and I imagine with my G4 as well).
Overall: The price, the size and value is right, and will be great for the near future for digital photos, movies, mp3, etc.
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TopStrengths: Fast, does everthing as advertised and more, Small, Light weight, less expensive than other options.
Weakness: The USB cable is way to short, should be at least 3 feet.
I would purchase another.
I am pleased with the purchase.
The USB cable is way to short, should be at least 3 feet.
It is Fast, does everthing as advertised and more, Small, Light weight, less expensive than other options.
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TopStrengths: Good while it lasts
Weakness: Died in few months
Date of birth: March 30, 2005
Date od death: December 27, 2005
Lasted for nine months, enough for loosing 200Gb of data.
My drive now keeps making clicks, no recognition. Man, this is sad.
I am waiting for an answer from LaCie Tech Support, but I already now they won't recover my data... it's in their site. If you like your files, don't you ever buy LaCie drivers. It's a piece of junk!
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TopStrengths: Very fast and quiet, impressive performance. Small and handy.
Weakness: Mr. Ferdinand Alexander Porsche (www.porsche-design.com) must have one of his bad days designing the boring enclosure. You'll be glad he didn't add four wheels while he was at it...
This is a great USB 2.0 drive. And at a very affordable price. Fast and ultra quiet (inside sits a 6B250R0 Maxtor DiamondMax 10, 7200 RPM, 16 MB cache, ATA/133). Couldn't hear it at all placed behind my TFT monitor. After simply adding an NTFS partition to the existing preformatted FAT32 single partition, I was able to backup/copy a total of 133 GB of unedited AVI-files. Some of them had 12 GB in file size. Overall copying took 1 h 30 min, which gives a whopping speed of 24 Mbyte/s! Wow! The file source was a Dell Dimension 8400, having two fast Maxtor drives connected in ultrafast raid0 configuration.
I also tested file transfer rate with my laptop, having USB 2.0 ports as well. But due to the slow 4200 RPM hard disk in the laptop, file transfer was clocked at about 10 Mbyte/s. But still very, very fast.
I've seen heat problems reported, but seems to be fixed now, enclosure temperature doesn't exceed 40 deg C. Is probably depending on inside type of drive.
I can recommend this fine external USB 2.0 disk to anyone.
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Topthis is a nightmare product. i have bought 3 - 250 gig ext firewire harddrives and they have all died within 6 months. From looking at the list of complaints on this page maybe we should try and get some compensation for the loss of time and money when the harddrives crash. It took me 6 months to fill up one of my drives with music wav files and i lost everything. I have called the company and got no compensation at all just the excuse that i must have bought from a bad batch. Buy this product at your peril !!!!!
Have you had problems with failed LaCie external hard drives?
I am an attorney with the law firm of David P. Meyer & Associates Co., LPA. Our firm is researching potential legal action against LaCie regarding alleged defects resulting in the failure of LaCie external hard drives during normal use. If you are experiencing this problem, and are willing to assist with our investigation, please contact me toll-free at 1-866-827-6537 (ext. 7031) or through our website at www.dmlaws.com and fill out an online consumer claim form so that our firm can evaluate your situation.
If the drive starts to spin up, clicks a few times, then spins down, I can probably retrieve the data from it.
I did on mine with no loss.
I just listed the service on ebay, search for LaCie Porsche Recovery.
i would like to purchase this product, but i am in canada..
is it possible to ship it to canada..
how much extra i have to pay for that.
please give me information..
thanks
Reply by member: funkmonk
Hey sachindeore,
Here's a link to the price listings for Canada:
http://www.pricegrabber.ca/search_getprod.php/masterid=17564193/
Strengths: Great price; Sleek look; Setup easy
Weakness: Short USB cable; Drive gets hot; Power switch is manual rather than press-button
I own several IOMEGA external hard drives and this LaCie drive is far better looking and cheap than those and other hard drives on the market today.
I did not partition the drive but just re-formatted into NTFS using Window XP. It was easy and I had it up and running in no time. The USB cable is very short though (only about a foot)so you might want to get another cable elsewhere.
The data-transfer speed is comparable to my IOMEGA drives (with USB 2.0). Playing movies or videos that are archived in the LaCie drive are also similar to my IOMEGAs. All in all, I find this drive to be equal to my IOMEGA drives in function but muc cheaper in price.
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TopStrengths: Cheap, stackable
Weakness: They fail mechanically. Data is not recoverable.
I have 2 of the 250MB drives and a 160MB. One of the 250MB drives began failing to mount within a few months, but by erasing it, I could get it to work with intermittent failures. Finally, it quit altogether. No data recovery program would even see the drive. I returned it to LaCie and they replaced it.
A friend of mine had the same problem. The drive would not mount or be recognized by any disk drive software (Apple Disk Utility, Symantec Utilities, TechTool, or DiskWarrior). When powered up, I could hear that the drive stopped starting up after only 2-3 seconds.
Well, my second drive failed the same way. Fortunately, I coaxed the drive into mounting one last time and I got my data off. I shipped the drive off to LaCie and they sent me a replacement drive, which was DEAD ON ARRIVAL. I did all the normal tricks (different computer, cables, power adapters, disk utilities) plus everything LaCie told me to try, but the drive was dead. Unfortunately for me, I had waited several months before I tried the drive and the original drive is now out of warranty, so LaCie will not replace the dead replacement drive they sent to me. 4 out of 5 dead drives makes for an 80% failure rate. And these are mechanical failures; once the drive dies, you cannot retrieve your data with data recovery programs. So, unless your data is disposable, do not buy one of these drives.
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TopStrengths: Works out of box. High capacity, inexpensive HD with no frills or learning curve.
Weakness: No extra features, but I consider the ease of use and the price point to mitigate this dramatically. Don't pay under 80 cents/GB and expect a HD with blinking lights, one touch backup, etc.
I can not beat this HD for low cost to high capacity ratio. I have other external HD (Maxtor 160 GB), which I also like, but I am buying a 2nd 250GB Lacie (and probably eventually more) to put in a network drive port (Linksys makes a nice network adapter that will allow 2 USB based external HD to plug in and thus network). This will give me 500 GB in network storage, which will probably be matched by another such set up early next year. The ability to get a TB of networked data for under 850 dollars, including ALL components is just amazing.
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TopStrengths: Looks great, works great
Weakness: Cable is to short, and it gets warm. The on/off switch is sort of small.
I really like this drive. I bought it because I heard good things about LaCie, and now I see why. So far I have no no problems with the drive. It looks great sitting on top of my Firewire drive, it looks so small sitting there. The drive is small, smaller thana I thought that it would be. The drive is really quiet since it has no fan, and the housing seems to do a good job reducing the drive's heat, the downside to that however is that the house gets warm. I really like this drive and will probably end up getting this same drive again, or a larger LaCie drive in the near future.
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TopStrengths: Pretty small, excellent price for the size (250 GB).
Weakness: A longer USB cable would be nice ... better safety in terms of turning off power without disconnecting (ala WD) would be nice as well.
This is definitely a more spartan drive than something like the external Western Digitals or Maxtors. Doesn't have a one touch button or anything like that. Also, the power switch is a simple one. Unlike the WD where you can't turn off the power unless it's safe, you can simply flip a switch with this drive.
But I consider myself an expert user, and for someone just looking for storage without bells and whistles, this will work just fine. Just remember you won't be getting all the frills of the Maxtor and WD drives ... though, I do think it's got a nice small footprint and design.
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TopStrengths: Was great while it lasted.
Weakness: Died within 2 months.
I loved my Lacie, apart from the short cable, getting hot, dull design and the little switch. It did the job... for 2 months!!
I spent lots of time over the past few weeks coverting all my CDs into MP3s to store on the drive. Finally done, I was relieved and impressed. However, 2 days later I went to plug it in, and nothing. No light on the front, it's stone cold and no faint whirring. It would appear it's burnt out and all my hard work is lost. Lacie themselves are no help, telling me to go to the retailer. The retailer have advised they will only replace it, which is fine with the warranty, but doesn't help for all the hundreds of hours of work I've done and now lost.
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TopStrengths: Great Price, has on/off switch
Weakness: The drive died on me in 7 days.
Buyer BeWare! If you purchase this drive, be sure that your data is kept somewhere else BESIDES on this drive. I lost a lot of files because this was my main source of storage. The drive itself contains a SEAGATE HDD, of which I thought was pretty good. 7 Days later, I could no longer access the data on the drive. My External Western Digital HDD's are still purring along. To conclude, buy an Extended Warranty and make sure that your data can be replaced. I will be taking mine back to CompUSA tomorrow morning to get a replacement AND an extended warranty. FYI... At first I thought that it was something else, but you can hear the drive clicking as it's trying to move the head from the "parked" position (if you put your ear up to the drive). With all of my troubleshooting that I did, it was finally confirmed to be a bad drive. Well... I just lost 70GB's of data from that little problem, 60GB's of which cannot be replaced.
=(
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TopMine just died too - after 4 months - and I lost 240G worth of data.
Mine is dead too. Nine months, 200Gb... It should be forbidden to sell this kind of sh...
Strengths: Heavy enough to hold papers
Weakness: Doesn't work
Bought three of these and all three didn't work. I called Lacie and the tech said that I must have got a "bad batch". I wonder if they do any quality control?
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TopWeakness: everything
i bought it less then two months ago mostly to transfer my music files from one computer to another and to have back ups. It worked great the first time i used it for that purpose. 2 days ago I moved all my music files from my lap top to transfer them to my desk top, and the the movie worked... went to plug it into my desk top and the drive was not recognized at all... tried plugging it back into my lap top and same thing. So, now i have over 5,000 songs trapped in this piece of crap.
I emailed their tech support and have not heard a thing back yet. Total piece of crap product.
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Top
brandonwood198
- Aug 16, 2006
Strengths: Small, quiet
Weakness: Pricey, cheaper to build your own
This enclosure was good for my needs. However, it is still cheaper to build your own enclosure. It was very small and quiet. I like it a lot. Thank you a lot
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TopStrengths: Very quiet and easy to use. Great Price.
Weakness: No backup software or other extras. But, that's fine because for the cost savings compared with other drives you can easily purchase the necessary software.
I am impressed by the small size and quiet operation. This unit does cause a bit of vibration so locating it really close to the desk you are working on isn't a good option. I just tucked it away behind the printer and don't even know its there except for all the extra file storage space I have. I am also impressed by the speed of data transfer with this drive.
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TopStrengths: Compact, sleek looks, great price
Weakness: Longer usb cable
Great drive for the price, 179$ for 250GB, can't beat that. It comes formatted IN FAT, I reformatted mine to NTFS. Easy to carry around.
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TopStrengths: Design - Looks better as day goes by. Drive Size - 250GB Price - Can't beat this. Drive recognition in XP - Instantaneous Quiet
Weakness: None so far
Debated over whether I should get a huge internal hard drive of 400GB or this Porsche-designed external HDD of 250GB. I went with Lacie and am I glad to have gone with this product. This external hard drive has the look, size and the quietness that I was looking for. I was able to hook this drive up to my PC in two minutes. There was no need to install any software. My XP Pro recognized it immediately. I was backing up data in no time. Never heard of Lacie but Porsche design was the clincher, I think. I am so glad that I bought this product and recommend it wholeheartedly.
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TopStrengths: Very good rate quality/price, compact and small. A bunch of GB in a reduced space!
Weakness: Noisy (as a hard disk running outside the CPU), faster in warming, and a few inchs more in the USB cable could be an advance.
I have used it during a month, I have watched movies, storage and listened music straight from the Lacie hard drive.
Against the first impression about the 8 MB, I thought was very few, but I have not got any problem. Probably the copy of files is a little slow, but acceptable. Then, my answer is a 4,5 stars product. I bought again if I were in this situation.
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TopStrengths: Speed , Connectivity and ease of use
Weakness: None so far
one of the best hard drives you can buy. I got it under a deal for $110 and it is worth every penny i paid. Sleek and stylish. The best investment for an external hard drive.
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TopStrengths: Very large storage with fairly low price!
Weakness: none (it does get hot but that doesn't bother me)
I love ths compact design of the LaCie external hard drive. I did not reformat the drive from FAT32 to NTFS, but it has no problems saving my data files so far.
This is my second external hard drive. I have my first one also made by LaCie (designed by Porche too but smaller--160GB). It works well and have a cool appearance that doesn't take much space. So I chose to buy the same brand, make, except getting a larger size for good.
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TopStrengths: Lightweight, on/off switch, large capacity
Weakness: Can get rather warm, Requires external power
My only complaint is that the hard drive requires power not supplied by the computer. Hard drive is nice and portable. Large amount of storage space for the price. The hard drive works great for my purpose (MP3 playback and storage).
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TopStrengths: Design, Portability, easy to set up
Weakness: Firewire cable is less than 2ft long
Everything about the hard drive was up to my expectations. The hard driveis compact and nicely designed. Setting up the hard drive for backup was also very simple and straight forward. The only problem I had with this hard drive was that the firewire cable included with it is less than 2ft long, making it a hassle to connect to the computer.
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TopThis particular HD only comes with usb 2.0, so not sure why you're mentioning firewire cable?
Strengths: Small - VHS Cassette
Weakness: Haven't seen any yet
I was shocked by the size. The picture makes it seem much bigger than real life.
I have a laptop that has no USB 2.0. Therefore, can't tell you about the speed.
Overall, It is great.
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TopStrengths: Great value per gig.
Weakness: none
It's was very easy to hook up and has more than enough space to handle all my music and video files I have. Transfer speeds are good for an external hard drive.
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TopStrengths: small, light, cute and fast!
Weakness: gets warm a little bit
This LaCie external hard drive is so compact and great that I am very satisfied with it so far. For me, the short USB cable does not matter at all because it can be used right next to computer anyway. Highly recommended!!
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TopStrengths: Simple Clean Design. Easy installation. Fast and quiet.
Weakness: Power switch is a small slide switch on the back adjacent to the power cable and is a bit difficult to locate and operation. A larger switch, possibly a rocker switch, would be more convenient.
A very nice external hard drive with convenient USB 2.0 connection. Solid internals (Maxtor MaXLine Plus II drive, Model: 7Y250P0). Used to back-up my internal hard drives for safe, off-site storage.
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TopStrengths: i just bought and checked. It works good! i like it. Fast and safe!
Weakness: Weakness is power supply when i ported to other places. I should alwayes keep it with driver.
i just bought and checked. It works good! i like it. Fast and safe!Weakness is power supply when i ported to other places. I should alwayes keep it with driver.
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TopStrengths: none
Weakness: all of it
I bought one of these for my wife because a) it was large at the time, b) was on sale c) looked pretty cool. 6 months down the line we were moving her pc and we dropped the drive about 2.5 inches and it hasn't worked since. I woulnd't buy again. I have a different drive that I put in my rucksack and take to work every day, swing it around, drop it etc and it works great, this thing is junk.
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TopStrengths: Solid construction and quiet when on
Weakness: power switch is located in the back....a bit awkward to find
A very good product for the money spent, I could not be happier with its performance. It has a very strong case for protection and its size makes it portable. Some reviews mention that this drive gets hot but I have not found that to be true with this unit. It operates at room temperature, possibly some folks are piling junk on top of it or placing it somewhere with little or no ventilation.
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TopStrengths: Cheap, looks nice, and stacks with other similar lacie drives.
Weakness: Ugly and hot power brick, very short USB cable. Run very hot if left on for long periods of time.
I\\\\\\\'ve bought 2 of these 250Gb drives over the past few years. Mainly because they look nice and are real cheap. Both are still running just fine. Reading a lot of these reviews I get the impression that people leave them on 24 hours a day, whether they use them or not. Thats why so many people complain that they die. With my 2 drives I keep the power switch off whenever I dont use them. This 1) Saves power and 2) saves the drive. I only turn them on when I need to backup everything on my system, or to copy files on and off. So they usually get about 1-2 hours of use per week. Doing that, I have not had any problems. Overall a good drive for the price, but if you want one that you will leave on and use all the time, this isnt the drive for you.
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TopStrengths: None
Weakness: Porsches are all defective desgins. Harddrive will faill in a matter of months.
LaCie knows this drive is defective and continues to sell it..
I have had 3 of these drives FAIL and all of them replaced. Each time, the replacement has FAILED. Lacie then only honors the warranty based on when the first drive was purchased.
LaCie is a very arrogant and negligent company that doesn't care about the integrity of their products. They knew this drive was defective and they continued to replace it with this same defective drive even after I told them I wanted a different model.
The bottom line is their drives will FAIL on you in a matter of months, not years.
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TopStrengths: Low cost per gb Perfect performance
Weakness: None
I've had this drive for almost two years for back up purposes. This drive, at least in my experience, has been bullet proof. Quick transfer speeds, is used as part of a series of back up routines that run almost every night of the week. I would highly recommend this unit!
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TopStrengths: Easy to set up and use; plenty of space for what I need.
Weakness: The backup software was not was I was hoping, as I wanted something that would sync; not create multiple backups of the same files. Found a free one online, though, that works great with this product
My review is really just the strengths and weaknesses that I already wrote:
Easy to set up and use; plenty of space for what I need.
However, the backup software that came with the drive was not was I was hoping, as I wanted something that would sync, not create multiple backups of the same files. Found a free sync program online, though, that does what I need and works great with this hard drive.
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TopStrengths: Plug and play.
Weakness: Died after using it
This could actually be the worst external hard drive to ever buy. Bought it a couple months ago and d6cided to use it last week. I bought it so I can store 40 GB containing 10 years of files, pictures, documents for work, videos of my kids growing up, i even had private information stored. Right after I transferred all the data from my desktop to the Lacie I "safely" removed the Lacie from my computer and reformatted my desktop. Right after, I plugged the Lacie back in and it started clicking and making this beeping noise. I tried to see if my desktop would be able to see the drive, but nope. It's dead. It's gone. I went to get the data recovered and was only able to retrieve half and it ended up costing me another $1200 dollars. Live and learn I guess.
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TopStrengths: size
Weakness: failure
This is a storage device-one should be able to store valuable data of any kind without fear of loss--this is true of anyone--especially for me since I no longer live in the U.S.. I have been through pc acrobatics(cables, different pcs, software, disk utilities, etc) just as indicated elsewhere--I have yet to start down the long road with Lacie but I will tomorrow--since my drive was always hot(foolishly ignored by me--listen up, those of you who have not yet had failure--it WILL--mine lasted longer than than many of the examples--1 year 4 months---but it died--not completely--I still hear it chirping like a cricket while it tries to come back to life)
Ironically enough I was planning to give this drive(250GB) to my daughter and buy two new 500 gb drives for myself when I visit the U.S. in a few months. Plans change.
If I am able to retrieve data after communication with Lacie I will post again
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TopStrengths: Storage Capacity. Inexpensive. ($125 shipped). Small physical size.
Weakness: Lack of confidence after reading about the high failure rate. Short USB cable.
I've owned this drive for over a year and have used it a LOT.
I typically carry it around in the bottom of my lunch box with food and miscellaneous junk piled on top of it. I have not pampered this drive at all yet it has never skipped a beat!
However, after reading about all of the failed drives, I no longer have much confidence in it. I'll never allow it to be the single source of storage for anything important to me.
At least the cost/GigaByte ratio of high capacity external hard drives keeps getting better all the time.
I'll try to shop more for quality than price next time.
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TopStrengths: Good price
Weakness: Cable way too short. Poor cooling, gets way too hot.
As others have mentioned the shortness of the supplied cable is a bit absurd. The case design looks nice but doesn't provide adequate ventilation to cool the drive inside. I put extra spacers under mine to try to get a little extra airflow around the cases but one still died after about 6 months. With how hot these things get I have no doubts the failure was due to prolonged overheating. Maybe next time they should get a competent engineer to design the case instead of a big name designer.
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TopStrengths: Excellent, customer freindly service
I ordered the Hard Drive External 250GB from PriceGrabber Storefronts last night.
However, due to my personal reason, I changed the mind to cancel the order.
When I tried to contact the PriceGradbber customer service, I could not locate the phone number to call. I nevoursly sent out the email to the storefronts seller (Seller: luckyonlinestore)and request to cancel the order.
I am very pleasure to receive the email back just a hour later from the 'seller'. Even they purchased from their vendor already, but they promised to tell the vendor do not ship out. Next day morning, I received a email from 'PriceGradbber' and confirmed the order cancelled.
This customer service is as good as I deal with other big brand name stores.
Remember, they did not make any money in this deal, actually, the seller lost $2.4 transaction fee to pay'PriceGrabber'.
I will like to do more business with them in the future.
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TopStrengths: Low price
Weakness: Disastrous
All the files of my Lacie hard disk 250GB disappeared a few days ago, then I tried to check out the reliablity of this product on internet. From the reviews of this web site, It confirms that I am just another victim.
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TopStrengths: Very compact Very good dollar/GB value
Weakness: No active cooling Very short USB cable
Thus far, no problems. I intend heat sinking and active cooling the drive. I doubt it will last long otherwise. Still, good value for the money.
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TopStrengths: Looks cool
Weakness: Fails within a short period of time and all data is lost
Mine failed with loss of a mass of data after only months. I accepted a replacement unit, and used it.
It lasted a year (but with hardly any use -- I rarely connected it or pulled it off the shelf), and then failed with loss of all data. I count that year as a very short period because of the very limited use.
DO NOT BUY LACIE PRODUCTS EXCEPT AS A QUICK WAY TO ERASE ALL YOUR DATA.
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TopStrengths: Size - Great Plug And Play
Weakness: Heat - Case Gets VERY Warm
The size is great - Super easy to hook up and use - USB cord
WAY to short - Because of the heat problem I do not leave it
on all the time computer is running - I turn it on when I need it - In relation to HEAT problem - I have a Lacie external hard drive on my MAC I use for graphic design -
No HEAT problem at all.
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TopStrengths: Cost. Size. Ease of use.
Weakness: None so far.
This is my 2nd experience with a LaCie Hard Drive Design by F.A.Porsche. Both drives have performed well so far. I would recommend the drive. My drives do not "travel" - they stay relatively stationary. Quiet - and fast enough for my backup and storage needs.
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TopStrengths: Works well, pretty fast, nice looking.
Weakness: A bit sharp on some edges, and the cable is a bit short (but that doesn't have anything to do with it's capabilities)
At first I had the wrong adapter and one of the cords kept falling out which made it hard to keep a stable connection but I called them and they sent me a new one right away and it worked fine, the customer service is really great.
It works well and nothing has been going wrong so far...so hopefully it lasts =]
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Top
Please consider this before buying...
Strengths: Price
Weakness: They fail... consistently. Just read the posts.
Listen, I like a deal like everyone else here on Pricegrabber. I do the math and I compare the prices and consistently LaCie drives are the best bang for the buck. But are they really?
Simply put, I've owned two of these and within, or just after a year of use, BOTH have failed. It's that simple. If the failure falls within the year warranty, and assuming you purchased it from one of their "authorized" resellers (and can prove it), they'll replace it fairly hassle free. Over a year, and you are SOL, as they say.
I used mine for daily back up and media storage. Once the first failed and was replaced under warranty, (thinking it was a fluke), I bought another and started mirroring the two drives for redundancy. I'm glad I did.
Life expectancy of drives varies. I'd say it's safe to expect 3-5 years. With that said, I've owned and built my own computers since 95 and have only had one drive failure and that was on a 5 year old machine. As for those who say that external drives are not intended to be run 24/7, I don't buy that. In my opinion, a well designed external drive should be able to run just as well as an internal drive.
There's really not much more I can say about these drives. Ascetically they're nice enough to look at & they're fairly quiet. But again, what does any of that matter if they FAIL. They FAIL.
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