LaCie 301315U 1TB Firewire 400/eSATA/USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

List Price: $200.99 Discount Price: $179.99

Features:

• 1 TB external hard drive features a stunning design by Neil Poulton
• Triple interface including FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0
• Plug and Play functionality for both Macs and Windows
• Fanless design allows for near silent operation
• Measures 4.6 x 1.8 x 7.6 inches (WxHxD)

Customer Reviews:

Smaller and lighter than I thought it would be. [Posted on 2008-07-29]
(That's a good thing!) Have used it as a repository for back-ups (via ShirtPocket's SuperDuper) of 2 internal Mac G4 drives and 1 external firewire drive-- it's still just a few months old-- but it worked efficiently and unobtrusively. The black high-gloss finish reminds me of a beautiful black mirror. Set-up was effortless. All that's needed is for LaCie is to make icons of it available. Bought it from JR Music after it went out of stock with Amazon. No free shipping but it came out cheaper even with shipping.

Super Fast [Posted on 2008-08-15]
I bought this drive to hold all of my video and photo files for my business and wow, its not only a lot of space but the transfer rate is insanely fast. I am actually running programs on this drive as oppose to my internal drive on my comupter. Great buy. great price, great product.

Very disappointed [Posted on 2008-09-17]
I have a lot of media files some of them very large (> 10GB) they were filling up my internal drive so I bought a Seagate external drive with triple interface (eSata, Firewire and USB). I was very happy with my purchase and decided I needed to keep a copy of some of the files in case the drive died. So I decided to buy another external drive and decided it needed to be something other than the one I have, in case the Seagate product had defects which might not surface until later. LaCie and Western digital drives looked like good choices as they have a lot of positive reviews. I finally bought a LaCie 1tb with the three interfaces from J&R music world at a price I thought was good (under 200$ which is around what I paid for the Seagate drive).
For a device that stores upto 1TB of data the most important criterion was for the data transfer rate to be high and thats why I wanted a device which had the esata and Firewire interfaces.
This is where the LaCie drive disappointed, The esata cable they provided did not work on the port on the drive, nor did my own esata cable, So I am not sure what that port was. The following is not scientific its just what I observed and its even possible the device I received was defective
eSata port - For my Seagate drive, data transfer to the disk after an initial burst of 65MB/s leveled off at around 40MB/s. The port on the Lacie drive marked as eSata was not compatable with the eSata cable they provided, so I could not test it.
Firewire port - Again after an initial burst of around 65MB (might have to do with 32 MB cache in those drives) Seagate leveled of around 36MB/s while the Lacie dropped down to around 14Mb/s
USB port - Around 26 MB/s for seagate and around 12 MB/s for Lacie.
Not knowing what the problem was I returned the LaCie drive.
Again its posible that I received a defective product, but maybe someone can post the speeds they get out of this product on this site.
After paying for the shipping costs I did not want to gamble with another LaCie drive so I ended up buying the Seagate drive again.
The problem could not have been with the interface because the initial burst was high, I think it might have to do with how the data is transferred from the cache to the disk. If the disk is defective the transfer rate could have been slow, just speculating here because I can't beleive that there can be so much difference among similar products in the market.
Anyway I am not going to touch a LaCie again until I read someone else posts on their observed data transfer speeds which I am happy with.

Works well but a little noisy [Posted on 2008-09-27]
I grew out of space to store my videos and captured footage. I bought this large capacity drive to solve that problem, and it has worked.

It was very easy to install on my desktop Mac. It has worked flawlessly out of the box, and the price was very competitive. I have used it for about one month so far.

I read reviews which told me that it was a little noisy and I thought that this would not bother me. I agree that the noise is not loud. It is a mild continuous background hum. But I was wrong.... It does get to me. The noise never goes away, and is the only drawback to this neat, small footprint, shiny black repository of huge amounts of data.

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