LaCie Hard Disk 500 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive, Design by Neil Poulton 301302U
by Lacie
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Our Price: $199.99 Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of LaCie Hard Disk 500 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive, Design by Neil Poulton 301302U
Customer Review: Overally good yet needs to be better to be the sole back up drive, 3.5 stars
Summary: 3 Stars
I have bought this drive over a month ago. The first item I have bought turned out to be DOA. I have called the customer service and could not be happier, they were lightning fast to take my call. If you have any problems, my suggestion would be to call them. However, since I bought the drive through Amazon, I decided to take advantage of their exchange offer which I thought would be faster. Second drive arrived very quickly. As of today, I have been running this drive 24/7 most of the time (most drives die within a few months if they have manufacturing problems - I wanted to initiate kind of a "burn" test to see if anything was wrong with it) and I have not had any problems with it.
With all this said, I am not a big fan of Samsung drives which this unit contains. And the fact that the first drive was DOA just made me a little more nervous. I can not rely on this as my sole back up drive. I keep my precious data on my 320gb Maxtor which has endured many 3-4 feet falls over the span of 5 years and this Lacie serves as a 2nd back up.
Unit runs relatively cool and quiet, just remember to put it on a solid surface because the bottom is responsible for heat dissipation. For example, if you put it on your bed, it will turn into a fireball pretty quickly.
Case looks very cool, and keep in mind that all external drives are more prone to failure than internal drives. I suggest you buy this through Amazon thus allowing you to exchange/return easily if you have any problems with it.
As for me, I wait before if this thing lasts a few trips in a luggage and runs 24/7 for another 3-4 months before I upgrade it to keep more important data.
Customer Review: State-of-the-art Art
Summary: 5 Stars
I was about to purchase one of the older F.A. Porsche disks when I stumbled upon this one last week. I purchased this to primarily be the Time Machine disk for my 230GB iMac (Leopard).
In the spirit of a nearly all-wireless iMac, I wanted the disk to be as inconspicuous as possible. The glossy black enclosure is nearly invisible sitting under the iMac on our black desk. The only truly visible feature is the ambient blue light beneath the front, but that's just cool. There are no markings whatsoever on the front or top of the drive.
Out of the box, the drive is easy to setup. After plugging it in, the Setup Assistant popped right up and had the drive properly formatted in just a couple of minutes. Then, Time Machine popped up automatically and presented the options to use the new disk.
I can't say much about the performance yet because I didn't benchmark the initial backup. The disk is very quiet when idle. It's moderately louder when busy, but still much less "clicking" than my older WD drive.
I was also considering a $120 Iomega drive, but the extra $15 for the art-form of this one was money well-spent. I also considered the Lacie Quadra FW 800 drives, but that seemed like expensive overkill for a backup medium.
Customer Review: Sleek and Jet Black
Summary: 5 Stars
This was my first external hard drive purchase and I had looked around at some companies. I ultimately ended up selecting this hard drive mainly due to the LaCie name brand, and the price. LaCie is a company that has been around since the 1990s and produced external hard drives that were reliable for Macintosh computers. I use a Windows XP PC. Well seeing that this drive was compatible with either Mac or Windows, I explored further. The Neil Poulton design was pretty nice with the rectangular firm line contour and sleek all black case. Another neat feature on the design was the blue power on light was underneath the machine and it would shine on the counter or desktop surface. The design ideas were excellent. This drive is very quiet, and I have not had any heating problems. I try to monitor it when its turned on, but so far, I haven't had any concern about its operation. I have stored data and music on it already and it was really needed as my laptop internal HD had gotten close to capacity. I am really pleased, and I am thinking of getting another Neil Poulton design hard disk, but at a higher capacity perhaps before the year is out.Customer Review: Pretty, but without the nice personality
Summary: 3 Stars
I chose two of these drives mostly for LaCie's Mac compatibility. We wanted to swap drives periodically to keep at least a reasonably current Time Machine backup off-site.
I have now used both of these identical, new drives for a few weeks. These drives seem to write more slowly than the older WD MyBook drive they replaced, and the noise is slightly louder (the bottom of the enclosure is very open for ventilation, so I think that this is simply normal hard drive noise bouncing off the hard desk surface, not a problem). The major annoyance is that the drives don't seem to respond well to sleep mode. When the computer is re-awakened, the drive needs to be switched off and then back on to be recognized. This is particularly annoying because until cycling the power on the drive, the computer becomes much less responsive, as if it's trying to re-connect to the unresponsive drive. This was never an issue with the Western Digital MyBook drive that was previously used for Time Machine backups.
On the bright side, there seem to be no data reliability problems (yet -- again, it has been less than one month).
Customer Review: Too Noisy!
Summary: 3 Stars
Although I love the minimalistic design and the cute blue light, this hard disk is much noisier than the 1TB WD MyBook HD I have borrowed from a friend of mine.
I'm an iMac user, and one big reason why I love iMacs is that they don't make any noise. I was mad at the Western Digital HD because of the humming noise it added to the environment, but it wasn't until I got this LaCie that I realized how silent my work environment has been so far! The WD hard disk is noiseless compared to this one! The fan produces a constant humming sound which drives me crazy, to the point that I had to configure my Mac to turn it off automatically, regardless of the fact that this will affect the hard disk's life span. I'll probably only use this for backups so that it stays off most of the time.
If you got a noisy computer or work in a noisy environment and are merely looking for good design, go for it. But if you are really sensitive to noise, you definitely have better options in the market.