LACIE 80GB External FireWire Hard Drive

Rating:
Summary: Lacie P3 (250gb) FW HD
Review: 'Designed by F.A. Porsche', claims the big packaging for this little box of storage. Coupled with the Lacie track record, and own experience of other Lacie drives, I had high expectations about this product. But on opening, the 'minimalist' design looked more like a Tandy or Maplin project box for electrical enthusiasts to stuff with DIY circuitry. So F.A. design indeed! Then, the first use of it on Apple i-mac led to an un-recoverable crash after trying to transfer data from one machine to another. There was a loud beeping, followed by an ominous flashing light on the front panel AND on the power-supply! Soon a SNAP sound and the smell of electrics burning. I took it back to our supplier who duly replaced it. Now two weeks later, it proved slow and impossible to use for editing with I-movie & a 700mb I-book. So after a few unsuccessful attempts to transfer the data to the laptop hard-drive, it seemed errors had crept in, and the Lacie unmounted itself from the I-book desktop. On restart, data could not be recovered, and prompted a 'Mac OS X doesn't recognise the drive...Intialise?' message instead. I know that Mac OS can be very fussy about some removable storage, but this is riduculous. IMHO stay away from this drive. Come back those sturdy old Lacies. Porsche go back to cars!

Rating:
Summary: don't buy LaCie drives - they will die young
Review: I bought a 60 GB LaCie Pocket Drive USB2/Firewire drive in August 2003, for $349.95 from Microwarehouse. Died December 2004, 3 months after manufacturers warranty ended.

Customer service was unhelpful, told me that there are only 4 manufacturers out there, and all have the same warranty. So I'm out $350.00.

My company also bought a LaCie d2 FireWire , 80 GB (300656) Hard Drive, which died after 3 months.


Rating:
Summary: 230GB Porsche LaCie firewire drive review
Review: I bought the Porsche Lacie 230GB firewire drive, and it is without a doubt the worst drive I have ever bought. To search this drive takes an interminable amount of time - 3-5+ minutes with only 20 gig on it, using a G4 with OSX Panther, and this is AFTER indexing the drive and AFTER updating the firmware. Unbelievable. Plus, it is NOISY. While waiting for a search to finish, I can literally hear this drive from the next room! IMHO it isn't worth the shipping charge.

Rating:
Summary: Good, simple and stylish hard drive
Review: I bought this hard drive 3 months ago to use as additional storage for my iBook. I was wary to buy it because it had not received any reviews and because reviews of larger Porsche Lacie drives were not glowing. However I didn't really need 100+ GB of space, I didn't need a backup button, I appreciated the design and the price was good, all of which set it apart from the rest for me. I use it almost exclusively for storing music files and digital photos. So far it has worked almost perfectly in these respects with iTunes and iPhoto. The setup was very easy and it was already HFS+ formatted (I think), though I formatted it myself to make sure, which was no trouble using the instructions given in the online documentation from Lacie. The online documentation was also very good, another aspect that set it apart from the rest for me. The only troubling moments I've had and the reasons I don't give it 5 stars are:

1) When I first copied over my iTunes library, it hung up on one song and would not proceed. I removed the song from my library and everything copied fine. To this day, I am unable (ironically) to add "Wait" by Sarah McLachlan to the hard drive.
2) When the drive is running there is a periodic ticking sound (maybe once every 10 sec) which is annoying because it makes me feel like something is wrong, but it doesn't seem to affect the performance.

Overall, the drive looks good, it's small and works fine for my needs. Also, it has two Firewire ports which allow for the connection of an iPod (while the drive is connected to the only Firewire port on the laptop).