LaCie Hard Disk 1 TB FireWire 400/USB 2.0/eSATA External Hard Drive, Design by Neil Poulton 301315U by Lacie
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Digital camera reviews of LaCie Hard Disk 1 TB FireWire 400/USB 2.0/eSATA External Hard Drive, Design by Neil Poulton 301315U
Digital camera Review: Awesome drive with minor drawbacks
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a beautiful looking drive. The Neil Poulton design speaks out with clean and sleek looks.
It is glossy black and the blue light is outstanding.
Neither Seagate's nor WD's external drives look so beautiful.
PROS:
1. 1TB is a lot of space - great.
2. Beautiful, sleek design
3. Triple interface - USB, eSATA and Firewire 400 (more on this in a moment).
4. Power button - I like the idea of having a power button on the drive, Seagate does not put one...tis comes in handy.
5. You can make the driv Mac and PC compatible simultaneously using the supplied software by LaCie...it's fairly easy. You're given the option to do so at the time of formatting.
6. LaCie's included software formatted the hard disk in a breeze and I was able to partition it easily using Vista's Computer Management utility.
7. LaCie's give vents at the bottomof the drive which is good as the whole body is made of hard plastic, so the body does not act as a heat sink.
CONS:
1. The glossy black finish looks beautiful but makes the drive a fingerprint magnet.
2. Noisy - this drive is noisy...you will notice the drive starting up and shutting down even if you are 15-20 feet away from it.
3. Firewire 400 cable - This does not work with Vaio's iLink outof the box, you need to buy an adaptor or a 4-pin cable to make it work with those. Well LaCie should specify that the cable will not work with 4-pin Firewire 400 jacks. You can buy a $3-$4 cable from amazon (that's what I did and it works fine) [...]
4. The HDD tends to get a little warm on prolonged usage, vents at the bottom help a lot but still it gets hot as the body is hard plastic.
Other than that an awesome product.
***UPDATE 11/12/2009***: After using this for a while I figured that the read speeds for the firewire interface is definitely more than the usb interface but for write speeds, firewire keeps decreasing (from 45mbps to 9mbps) while usb keeps consistent at about 25 to 30mbps. Can't say if this is an issue with the drive.
***UPDATE 12/28/2009***: I contacted LaCie tech support and they responded promptly to my concern about slow write speeds. They came out saying that its probably because of corrupt file system so I had to delete all partitions and format the HDD. This did not help and after searching some forums, I found that there is a performance setting for external HDDs in Win Vista and 7. After tweaking that, I get 27-28 MB/s consistently via iLink (firewire 400).
Digital camera Review: Awesome drive, just do it.
Summary: 5 Stars
Wanted something inexpensive but high-quality.
This bad boy fits the bill. Looks great, fast drive, just awesome. It's my 4th LaCie and has never let me down.
Digital camera Review: Beautiful drive, mediocre performance
Summary: 2 Stars
I just got the Lacie 1TB drive and started backing up some of my files to it. I first tried connecting it via the eSata interface and after a few hiccups (I'm using Vista), the drive's initial partition showed up with a start.exe file on it. When you run this file, it performs a quick format of the drive and you are set to go. I left my machine copying a few gigabytes and went for dinner. When I came back the files were copied but the drive was no longer showing up. So much for the eSata interface. I then connected it using Firewire. This connection is fine so far, except that it is really slow. If you copy a large file (a few hundred MB) throughput will start high (60MB/sec which is nonsense for Firewire) and quickly go down to about 7MB/sec which is really slow. I haven't tried the USB connection yet believing it to probably be the slowest.
The drive itself is really beautiful. Noise emission is average to slightly loud.
Digital camera Review: Beautiful enclosure, stackable
Summary: 4 Stars
I'm connecting two of these drives to a RAID controller to mirror my data through the eSATA connection. The drive has one of the most beautiful enclosures. When they're stack together with the blue LED shining on to each other, it creates quite an artistic feel. For those people who value esthetics, you shouldn't miss this one.
The drive itself is working just as advertised. A drive is a drive. Hasn't failed on me yet.
The only star I took off from the rating is due to the cables that ship with the product. They're so short.
Digital camera Review: Best external drive I have used
Summary: 4 Stars
This drive is smaller quieter and better looking than any of the drives I'v used in the past.
I like it a lot better than the WD drives and it it works great with the Mac OS.
The 1TB disk actually gives you about 930GB of usable storage--I wonder what the other 70GB is being used for???