I purchased the LaCie 1TB as my first external hard drive, about 6 months ago. I wasn't sure how much space I would be needing, but as the LaCie was on offer for £75 for 1TB I couldn't really resist.
The promotional literature for this Hard disk seems to keep reminding us that it was designed by Neil Poulton, someone who I'm not aware of, but must be pretty good judging by the design of this product.
It is rare when talking about an external hard drive that style is a talking point, but in this case it is. It's a sleek black elegant looking case, very very shiny. At the front there is a small strip of blue light that activates whenever the hard drive is turned on, everything else it on the panel at the back (on switch, connectors and vent) making the device very uncluttered and minimalist.
What I will say though, is it would probably be a good idea to have a cleaning cloth with this device, as the shiny black surface has an awful habit of showing off your fingerprints, there isn't a cloth included unfortunately.
So, what is included? well, the LaCie supports lots of different transfer methods, I used the firewire, but it also comes with cables for USB and a few others, I think this choice is great. Unfortunately the cables are very short, which would be fine if you want the hard disk to sit right next to your desktop PC. But I'm using a laptop, and the nearest desk, which was only a short distance away, was too far for the cable to reach.
I had to resort to picking up a slightly longer cable for about £2 from play.com
Not the best of starts, but, the device itself more than makes up for it. Its smaller than the pictures make it look, not as wide as a DVD case, and about the height of two and a half. Nice and compact.
On my mac, it instantly was recognised as a storage device with no trouble and I assigned it to be a backup drive, it's been perfectly reliable ever since.
It's not particularly noisy, you can hear it, but it's hardly noticeable unless you think about it, it doesn't have in internal fan, which allows for a much quieter drive.
Often it is argued that you should only use external hard disks to back up data, and not as extra storage space when you are running out. With the 1TB LaCie you can have both.
I partitioned my device, setting aside 250GB for personal files,HD movies, photos etc. and the rest for backup. I used free software downloaded from the net for this on my mac, but I think there is a utility for doing this without any extra software on windows, not sure though.
For the price you can get the LaCie I would say it is great value for money and has provided me with the perfect first external hard drive.
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Postage & Packaging: £6.95 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Jun 14th, 2009
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