LaCie Hard Drive Firewire 301146U Review

I bought this paperweight in late 2004 and it failed instantly in the middle of a video editing project, capturing 10 hours of saved video. I contacted Lacey for support and the tech referred me to a one of a kind data recovery software company and I was able to recover about 70% of the data. It hasn't worked since then (Christmas today) and I don't think it's worth paying for any software to clean up after this unreliable device. This is particularly disappointing as a number of friends (Mac…

Well I've been using this happily for 13 years as a file backup -- I reformatted it from FAT32 to NTFS tonight to store multi-gigabyte video files from Premiere and found that it has a date stamped in 2006 (it was bought new for an old job I was doing). and the damn thing still works great. I'm not sure why I decided to check it out; I think it's late and I'm bored. I will update my five star rating and eat my words if he ever dies.

Almost immediately, a separate power supply "Brick" began to fail. After scouring the internet and reading reviews from other people with the same symptoms, I called Lacie support and requested a new power supply. I received a new shipment (bigger than the original) about a week later and have had no problems since. This device is mainly used for backup purposes and also for transferring data between computers. It's easy to use and I'm happy with the speed.

Ordered Friday, received Monday, installed same day. I have a MacBook Pro and the device is already set up for it. All I really had to do was plug the 800 cord into the unit, plug the 110v cord into the wall, and that was it. Just a no-brainer. One-click backup works great, especially cool with Leopard and Time Machine. Reading the instructions took longer than anything else. Buy it.

I have 3 LaCie drives and they all work very well. This is the last one I bought and I was even happier than previous purchases. Finally figured out how to make this drive completely silent. If you are a HD music lover and you stream music from your hard drives, you will love this feature. Fan noise and drive noise are almost non-existent. There are also great USB options, FIREWIRE 400 and FIREWIRE 800. The previous version only had 2 FireWire ports, but adding USB was a great idea. Now you can

I've been using this external drive with my MacBook Pro for a month now and haven't had any problems. It serves as the primary backup drive to mirror my MBP's internal drive in the event of a failure. I also use it to store DV files for editing and other multimedia files. As expected, the transfer speed is faster than Firewire 800. The average transfer rate at 50% utilization is 27-70 MB/s. While 16MB of cache would be better for a drive of this capacity, 8MB is sufficient for most needs. The…

The first unit had intermittent short circuits; and repeatedly picked up and disabled the computer. The replacement unit was even worse than the original. The Firewire 400 connection was delivered faulty and not working. The disk had to be formatted, it was only possible via USB. Devices are extremely slow when transferring data files (e.g. 5 hours for an 11MB file over USB 2). During long file transfers, hard drives keep failing, displaying hard drive error warnings, and are not recognized by…

I use this with an Apple G4 PowerBook. I tested transferring large and small files. Using the fastest FW800 interface, the speed was around 19MB/s. It's excruciatingly slow. With the FW 400 I got about 12 MB/s. It's like a disabled snail. Smaller files are transferred more slowly. Drive is quiet. It doesn't seem to overheat or get too hot. It was very easy to set up multiple sections. Or you can use it right out of the box. It's very compact. I haven't tried any other external hard drives with…