Review on 1 TB USB 3.0 Portable External 💾 Hard Drive by LaCie Porsche Design P'9220 (302000) by Kenneth Broszko

I have been using LaCie portable drives for at least 10 years and have not had any long term problems with them with constant power and use or long periods of storage without power. However, it became inevitable that I had to put in some serious effort to get them working on my Windows7 systems. I took off two stars because of the complexity and technical skill required to make them work, but I'm giving them three stars because they really work in the end. I'm sure many have returned their devices thinking they were faulty when in fact the setup utilities are to blame (which is exactly what I did with my first Minimus drives). The bottom line is that unless they're configured according to factory procedures, there's little reason to worry about why they won't work. I won't hesitate to return it if the setup app crashes and you don't want to do the technical work to get it working. I create a partition on the drives and mainly use it for automatic backups of NAS and Windows servers. Desktop/Laptop systems through regular swapping with drives in a vault. I always test new discs for a week in order to burn them before using them for real work and important data. This should solve problems with child mortality. PROS: * Better performance than the smaller 3TB and 4TB Porsche USB3 drives I currently use. I'm seeing speeds of up to 125MB/s using benchmark software on my workstation and 25-80MB/s on various file copy operations.* I like the form factor and body, and the quiet operation. This is a solid block for desktop use. It's smaller than some external drives, but it's certainly not small. Slightly larger than the Minimus in all dimensions.* The aluminum body never gets hot in active use, but I wouldn't stack them on top of each other. The outer case isn't aluminum all around like the Minimus, so it's more prone to dust and liquids than the Minimus, but since the hole is on the bottom, it usually stays clean.* The white assembly status indicator on the front is obvious and off Visible from different angles.* Comes with the same small power adapter (12 VDC, 1.5 A) as previous Minimus and Porsche drives and the same power connector. An external power supply must be used. It also uses the same USB3 data cable. In other words, you can connect Minimus and Porsche drives to the same power and data cable set. CONS: Otherwise it will fail leaving the drive in a useless state, otherwise it will fail and you cannot connect more than one LaCie drive to this computer at a time is not compatible with Win7 Mount. The last 5TB drive had a new rather nasty issue that needed to be resolved ["Signature collision with another drive"] before I could complete the manual reconfiguration. The good news is that there are built-in Windows tools that will properly repair and configure these drives, but they are not obvious to the layperson and can damage other good drives if not handled carefully. Following LaCie's technical support procedures is a trick, but they're hard to find and not up-to-date on newer operating systems. If the configuration app crashes (not uncommon), files and documents on the hard drive can be lost and not appear on the website. It is recommended to keep them in a safe place before starting the setup. Workarounds: In 2013, LaCie Technical Support provided a link to a technical article that worked great. As of 2016, it still exists but is marked as unsupported. On the LaCie website, type "Volume Corruption - Fix Windows Vista" in the Knowledge Base search box and a how-to article will appear. IMPORTANT: The *critical* choice is to initialize the drive with GPT instead of MBR (the default), but this detail is not shown in the article (a tech support rep pointed out this vulnerability, but LaCie never shared the document fixed.) GPT is the magic initialization that you must use in order for the drives to behave properly. I no longer run their installation script on the hard drive as this usually results in corruption that needs to be repaired and the hard drive won't set up properly anyway. Now I just manually start the LaCie website procedure. it's faster. My unit has a Seagate ST5000DM000-1FK178 drive, a model that has surprisingly few helpful online reviews. Given that Seagate acquired a controlling stake in LaCie in 2012, it makes sense that LaCie devices would use Seagate hard drives. It annoys me that the Windows configuration problems persist. Updated 03/31/2018. The two drives in my backup rotation are working fine after 18 months with 50% power cycles per drive. This is consistent with several other LaCie drives I use. Once operational, they continue to run for several weeks before being shut down and replaced. I don't do a lot of power cycles on them.