Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: Almost silent, very fast transfers, looks coolThe drive ships formatted in FAT32. If you're going to use it on Macintoshes running OS 9 it MUST be reformatted to HFS+ using Disk First Aid or something like that.
Rating:
Summary: Works Great!
Review: Bought this for iMac G4 running OS X Panther. Works great. Everything I could ask for.
Rating: 
Summary: worst thing ever
Review: DO NOT BUY THIS!!!! I recently bought this item to back up three years worth of work for my thesis project. This drive only worked long enough to transfer all of my work on, and then it crashed. I have started to talk with the technical support, but they are useless. Basically they will not take any responsibility for producing defective products, and the worst part is it takes them about a week to answer any emails.
Rating:
Summary: Great back up drive
Review: I am pleased with this drive, which was easily formated following the instructions for my Mac G4 OS 10.2. It is exceedingly quiet and efficient. I transferred about 5 GB of song files in a couple of minutes and then had them playing back on iTunes. The automatic back up is also useful, since it backs up my docs every night at 1 a.m. Don't see any downside ... so far.
Rating:
Summary: Works fine with OS 9.0.4 for me.
Review: I bought the 160gb drive, did not format it in any way, loaded it with video pre edited and post,a couple thousand still photos and it works fine .I can't wait to attach it to my G5 when it arrives.
Rating:
Summary: Nice looking piece of junk
Review: I bought this drive to backup data on my Apple Mac iBook, running OS X with a G4 (the computer is 6 mos old). Out of the box, the drive should have been up and running, but when I plugged it into the computer, it wasn't recognized, and couldn't be used. So I returned it to Lacie and they fiddled with it, and sent it back. I plugged it back in, and still nothing. I called Lacie back, and they said it worked at their place. I tried it on 3 other macs, and none of them recognized the drive, it was like it wasn't even there. It wasn't a problem with the computers or the cables, I have other firewire drives that work fine. So I returned the piece of junk and bought a Seagate, which so far works like a charm.
Rating: 
Summary: compact, stylish, quiet
Review: Mac users: first thing you should do is reformat the drive as an HFS+ volume using Disk Utility. This will allow you to use unicode characters in your filenames, a must if you'll use the disk as a volume for iTunes. This is a bit annoying since Mac users really seem to be the target demographic for this drive. But once that's out of the way, the drive works great. Its clean, minimalist design is a perfect compliment to the Powerbook it sits next to, and it spins down to be near silent when I'm it's not being accessed. Exactly what I wanted in a drive.
Rating:
Summary: Don't buy this for backup or critical data
Review: My Lacie P3 160GB FireWire drive performs very unreliably - so much so that I cannot trust my data to it. Problems included the dreaded "delayed write failed" message in Windows XP usually followed by corruption. It gets very hot in use which may be part of the problem. I used this drive with a number of PCs including a Toshiba Satellite Pro M10, a HP Laptop and a desktop with a Gigabyte 865PE Chipset motherboard with integrated firewire. Tonight it finally gave up completely and Windows claims it is not even formatted. Lacie UK Tech support are a joke.
I also have a Lacie d2 which is much better built, and seems to work well without problems on both USB2 and Firewire. I haven't tried out the new firewire 800 on it yet, so can't comment on that.
Rating:
Summary: stylish but no starter!
Review: The drive is very stylish. Tried it on MAC panther OS, EXTREMELY slow, compared to my other LaCie d2 drive, also if it comes across anything it doesnt like (file name too long, unrecognized symbol) just quits copying. This product is practically useless but will be a nice stylish accessory for your retro office.
Rating: 
Summary: May be among the best of a bad bunch
Review: The world of firewire drives for the Mac is not a happy world. LaCie's 250GB Porsche enclosure/drive has received awful reviews, for example. In my own experience I've recently tried and returned TWO enclosures for a 200 GB Maxtor. My subsequent research has found bad experiences with every vendor, save perhaps WeibeTech.
Of all the enclosures and drives I've tried, this one, borrowed from a friend, worked best. I may buy it, but I would NOT buy the 250 GB relative for any price. The reviews of that drive are uniformly negative.
Here's the fundamental problem:
1. USB 2 and Firewire 400 were in competition for a few years. USB 2.0 won.
2. Only owners of older Macs need a Firewire 400 drive, owners of newer Macs will usually go for a USB 2 drive.
3. The Firewire spec is very demanding. Most Macs and most enclosures don't really meet the specs -- but they fall short in different ways.
4. Various point releases of OS X have broken firewire support in different ways.
5. Different drives in the same enclosures yield different results.
6. Different cables produce different results, the best cables are expensive.
This is how to test:
1. Check heat. Run the drive hard for hours. Does the enclosure get too hot to hold? I had one drive almost melt the enclosure.
2. Check drive transfers. Transfer 100 GB of data. Does it work?
3. Dismount the drive and unplug. Plug again. Repeat. Does the drive mount and dismount?
4. Mount the drive. Put your machine to sleep. Awaken it. Does the drive spin up on request?
5. If you have an iPod, try it daisy chained with the drive. Can you mount, dismount? Does iTunes work? (Note however, iTunes may have trouble with any music library stored on an external drive, this appears to be an iTunes bug.)
Only the LaCie 160 passed all 4 tests on my iBook dual USB running 10.3.5. Two other enclosure/drive pairs failed.
So it may not be great, but it may be "better than the rest".
PS. I read a review here that said: "The drive is very stylish. Tried it on MAC panther OS, EXTREMELY slow, compared to my other LaCie d2 drive, also if it comes across anything it doesnt like (file name too long, unrecognized symbol) just quits copying. This product is practically useless but will be a nice stylish accessory for your retro office."
I wonder if that reviewer had the drive formatted as FAT32. A FAT32 formatted drive will display the problems he experienced. All he would have to do is use OS X Disk Utility software to reformat as HFS+. Unless you have very particular reasons, you should make sure the drive is HFS+ formatted.
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