Review on LaCie Hard Drive Firewire 301146U by David Olson

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 average speed of the Firewire 400 is 20-33 MB/s. USB 2.0 is the slowest at an average of 13-18 MB/s. Note that these are rough estimates and read/write speeds may vary depending on the size of the file, the part of the hard drive being written to, the level of file fragmentation, and the characteristics of your computer. But usually Firewire 800 is the fastest and USB 2.0 is the slowest. Although this drive does not have an internal fan, the Seagate ST3320820A 7200 rpm hard drive is not quiet. I can clearly hear the hum of a spinning hard drive next to my MacBook Pro. When reading or writing, you can also hear clicks from the disk head. Every hard drive makes noise, with some being quieter than others. I've found Western Digital drives to be the quietest, Hitachi fairly loud, and Seagate somewhere in between. I have the LaCie under my desk and don't notice the hum, but sometimes I hear it clicking. I don't mind clicks as it helps me to know when he's busy. But the constant hum on your desk can drive you crazy, especially when you're working in a quiet environment. So I recommend putting the disc in a place where you won't see it. One of the features of this drive is that it stops when you disconnect it from your Mac. Some external hard drives keep spinning until they are powered off. LaCie also obeys the energy-saving power management settings of your Mac's hard drive. I believe the default rotation time is 10 minutes. There are various third-party tools that you can use to change the rotation time. I just use the terminal and the "pmset" command to change this. For example, to change the spin time to 45 minutes when my MBP is plugged into the charger, I type the following into the terminal: sudo pmset -c spindown 45 One caveat when changing the spin time - this setting affects all attached drives, including your internal drive. . Therefore, you must select which speed limit is appropriate for all drives. (Personally, I agree with the remaining 45 minutes.) And the last one. If you want to use this drive as a bootable backup drive with your Intel Mac, first repartition the drive using the GUID partitioning scheme. This is one of your options in Disk Utility. You can then back up your internal drive or install OS X on LaCie and boot from it. The default partition scheme is the Apple Partition Map, which is bootable for PowerPC Macs. In order to boot from Windows, you must repartition it as the Master Boot Record. In summary, I've had a good experience with this drive and would recommend it to anyone looking for an affordable, high-capacity, Mac-compatible Firewire 800 drive.