LaCie Rugged All-Terrain 500 GB FireWire 800/ FireWire 400/USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive 301371 by Lacie
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List Price: Our Price: $117.89 You Save: $14.99 (11%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $110.00 (click here) Category: CE See more digital camera details and other models |
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Digital camera reviews of LaCie Rugged All-Terrain 500 GB FireWire 800/ FireWire 400/USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive 301371
Digital camera Review: As expected
Summary: 5 Stars
this is a really good drive. Easy to use and works every time.
Don't know about customer support because I haven't need to call them.
Digital camera Review: At your risk
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought this for a Christmas present. It arrived in a typical software paperboard box with the drive basically exposed in the BIG shipping box. The shipping box it was sent in was 5x bigger then the drive. No innerpak. It rattled in the box from florida to South Dakota like a marble. I wouldn't even consider using it considering all drives are somewhat fragile.Amazon has been good in the past and this was shipped out of XP passport inc. Cearwater,Florida FOR Amazon. I'll buy it elsewhere.Digital camera Review: Best hard drive I've ever bought
Summary: 5 Stars
If you want to buy a hard drive, this is it. I keep all my stuff there and I know they're going to be safe. One of the best things it can do is transfer huge files FAST. It's worth the money. It could be a little bulky and bigger than other hard drives but it's for a reason and I don't mind the bulkiness as long as it's giving me everything else I need.Digital camera Review: Beware - LaCie quality is poor, and support is minimal...
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought this drive because it is rugged and I assumed it would be safer place for my data. Plus it had good warranty (as written on the box).
I was wrong, or there were significant strings attached, on all assumptions:
1. Reliability - three drives died in the row! First drive failed very soon, was sent for repair twice (at my expense) and both replacements failed.
2. Hassle for exchange - first time through, I was asked to do hours of testing before they agreed to exchange it. Significant part of that testing was not necessary and delayed exchange process.
3. Peace of mind - none. By the time drive failed three times, I was not sure I would use it even if I got new one. I needed some data from it (had backup at remote location), and knowing that model is worthless I went ahead and opened it. I knew this would void my warranty, but I didn't care. However, curious how LaCie would react on really poor quality, I contacted them again. I probably wouldn't use replacement drive at all, but I wanted to see would they try to go extra mile after they failed so many times, to know should I bother with other products they have.
4. That showed their commitment to quality - you would think that after three drives failed in the row, company committed to the quality would try to appease customer who spent money amounting to significant portion of new 500gb drive price to ship defective units to LaCie. Not to mention that, if I didn't had other backup, I would be short on 1.5GB of my data... Nope. They didn't tried to appease me in any significant way. They decided to say "you opened drive, we are sorry for inconvenience, you are out of luck". Within their rights, but certainly doesn't qualify as anything more then "we would do only bare minimum of customer care".
In effect, LaCie quality is poor, and their support attitude could be summarized as "this rarely happens, tough luck it happened to you". With canned "we are sorry" answers in one paragraph, and "we can't do anything for you" in the next. It is your money, and if this is your idea of acceptable business relation, you are certainly welcome to work with LaCie.
For me, when I buy RUGGED drives, I care about safety of data and peace of mind. LaCie was clearly unable to provide first, and didn't care about providing second.
Digital camera Review: Big, fast, warm--requires 2 USB ports and an extra hamster
Summary: 3 Stars
This drive looks great and has lots of capacity, but I've run in to a couple of things you might want to consider.
[1] I bought the drive to use with my new laptop, a Fujitsu T5010 TabletPC. Unfortunately the laptop comes with a 4-pin Firewire port. The LaCie comes with connectors for USB, 6-pin, and 8-pin Firewire. One must purchase a 4-to-6-pin converter to use the Firewire. I'm using the USB right now and the speed seems pretty good.
[2] The LaCie drive takes some juice to run! The manual says that if the USB bus does not provide enough power, one should plug in the supplemental USB power cable. I have found that I must always plug in both this power cable and the data connector to make the drive work, even on my tower. So the drive will occupy two of your USB ports when running.
[3] The drive makes a great hand warmer on cold days--it runs hot!
[4] Although the drive worked fine with my laptop at first, the two didn't get along last week. When I would plug the power cable in the drive would emit a soft beep-beep-beep-beep, but never the expected whooshing sound of the drive actually running. And while beeping, it would never be recognized by Windows when I would plug in the USB data cable. It never did this on my 2 towers and continued to work fine on them. Could it be that the laptop's lower USB port voltage (4.94-4.96) is right on the edge for the LaCie? The towers always read 5.03-5.06 VDC. Today the drive started to work again on my laptop, but I'm concerned about this potential source of unreliability. If it is a power issue, LaCie does sell a plug-in power adapter, but that kind of defeats the 'All-Terrain' portability lure, no? Does my Fujitsu need an extra hamster? Or does the LaCie need a more efficient motor?
[5] The LaCie drive comes with one year of free unlimited online backup. Unfortunately I was not able to find anywhere on their web site how much the service costs AFTER the year is up. But with Microsoft Office Live offering 25 GB of free storage space I suppose I don't really care!