LaCie Big Disk Hard drive 1 TB

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Capacity, looks, decent manual, cheap
Disadvantages:	A bit slow, a lot to lose in one go

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

With people starting to amass more and more data on their PCs, the old methods of backup such as tape or CD & DVD are becoming woefully inadequate. As a result, by far the most cost efficient method for either storing data or backing it up is the external hard drive.

That said, 1TB or 1 Terrabyte is a crazy amount of space and the sort of storage that would have kept a multinational company ticking over nicely ten years ago.

The LaCie (pronounced Lassie, like the dog) 1TB unit is a reasonably basic device that only has a USB2 (although USB1 is supported) interface and comes with a suitable lead, external power supply and software CD. It can work with both PCs and Macs although by default it's formatted for PC use so Mac users will need to reformat it first but that's no hardship really.

On first opening the box, it looks really good with a great finish making it fit in with most environments with ease. It's a pity the power supply is external as these tend to clutter the floor up a bit, I'd have liked to see it built in but I suppose that would have added to the heat problems that modern fast hard drives suffer.

The LaCie tries to be as quiet as possible with a case designed to cool passively but it does have a fan around the back that kicks in when needed. In my case, this was fairly often but then I only tend to switch the drive on to use it, it's rarely left idling.

The front contains an on/off button that also doubles as a power and activity light. The combination of blue against the aluminium case is pretty nice so thumbs up there. A nice touch which I'd not had on any previous drives of this type is that it automatically powers down when the host PC is switched off.

As with all external hard drives of this type, it is easy to use - just plug it in, switch on and you're done. Windows loads the drivers automatically and assigns a new drive letter. The supplied CD contains some backup software which I haven't trid to be honest so I can't comment.

In use it seems fine. I copied some files across and it seemed to work well enough although it did feel a bit sluggish so I did some tests against my other external hard drive. Sure enough, it was slower in certain circumstances. Copying a big file like a movie was about the same speed as the other drive but copying lots of smaller files was signficantly slower. I've done some research and it seems to be the overhead in managing all the space as Windows loads the entire file structure in to memory which with 1TB is quite sizeable. It was disappointing though, especially as one of the reasons I chose this drive was to backup entire PCs which would results in tens of thousands of small files.

Another thing to bear in mind is that as these drives get bigger, so does the amount you'd lose if they failed. 1TB could hold your entire life and then some and if it failed... Disaster.

I never rely on any one device or method for backup so anything important I store on this will also be on 1 or more PCs and at least 1 DVD, preferably 2. Having lost important things in the past, I'm doubly careful now.

It also came with a surprisingly good manual with lots of useful information for both PC and Mac users which was a nice touch. A 2 year warranty is provided.

Conclusion

On the face of it, this is a nice device. Huge space for the price, looks good and fairly quiet. However, the speed is a concern and I also felt with something this size, other connection options would have been nice such as Firewire. If you feel confident that you could cope with losing everything in one hit and surviving, should it go wrong, then this is probably worth trying given the attractive price. Personally I'd rather have gone for a pair of 500GB drives and either shared the backup duties between them or had the same data on both. The fact that the manual warns against stacking them because of heat problems also rings alarm bells for me. As such, I can't recommend this unit despite it's plus points.