LaCie Mobile Hard Drive Design by F.A. Porsche FireWire and USB 2.0 80 GB

External Hard Drives need to be portable, reliable, no-fuss, and styled by car designers.

Ok, the latter is untrue, but maybe all hard disks should! I'd sure like to see a Morris Minor portable solution, or a Robin Reliant mobile hard disk.

Jokes aside, the unit IS rather attractive. Its housing is rather svelt and sleek, blending in subtley with your computing array. After purchasing various Mac products throughout ...
...against a G5 or a PowerBook. Please don't put me down as some computer-fashion authority though, it was simply the best FireWire-interfaced drive I could afford on a stringent budget of £65 back in September 05!

The drive has four rubber feet that keep the housing protected from surface scratches, or should I say "had". After only a few days, two of the feet fell off at the back. One went bouncing off under a desk never to ... more

External Hard Drives need to be portable, reliable, no-fuss, and styled by car designers.

Ok, the latter is untrue, but maybe all hard disks should! I'd sure like to see a Morris Minor portable solution, or a Robin Reliant mobile hard disk.

Jokes aside, the unit IS rather attractive. Its housing is rather svelt and sleek, blending in subtley with your computing array. After purchasing various Mac products throughout the academic year 05/06, the brushed alumium looks great up against a G5 or a PowerBook. Please don't put me down as some computer-fashion authority though, it was simply the best FireWire-interfaced drive I could afford on a stringent budget of £65 back in September 05!

The drive has four rubber feet that keep the housing protected from surface scratches, or should I say "had". After only a few days, two of the feet fell off at the back. One went bouncing off under a desk never to be seen again and the other is now super-glued to the bottom in the middle. I shudder to think of poor Porsche drivers speeding along the motorway suddenly finding their back wheels have sprung off... and I doubt super-glue would be of use!

The drive has maintained a minimalist look. A tiny orange LED appears when the drive is on, and flickers to show activity. Aside from that there is no indication of the drive's status. At various points around the housing, the "Lacie" logo and "Design by F.A. Porsche" are engraved into the aluminium giving the unit a sort of personalised/prestigious feel. Let's not get carried away here though, it's still a hard disk no matter who designed it and does the same job as your regular unit!

Moving away from appearances, as we all know these can be deceptive, we'll take a look at the rear of the unit, the connection panel. It features a power switch, a power socket, two FireWire 400 ports, and a USB 2.0 port, nothing complicated, just the tools for the job. The second FireWire port is for daisy-chaining devices. This is super-handy, as many PCs and Macs have only 1 FireWire 400 port. Hook up the hard disk to the computer and plug your next FireWire device into the free port on the hard disk. Easy peasy!

From many years of experience using PCs running Windows, and my last year becoming intimate with Mac OSX, I honestly don't have a favourite. It's difficult to choose as Windows does some things far better than OSX can, and OSX makes some tasks wonderfully easy where windows struggles. OSX makes using external drives a doddle. This drive was pre-formatted for OSX, so i simply plugged in the power cable, plugged in the FireWire cable, turned on and it popped up on the desktop, ready to go. In Windows, although easy enough, the user is required to go through various menus, not often easy for beginners I'd imagine, and format the drive. Once this is done, however, the drive is as easy to use as on a Mac. Plug in, turn on and there you have it.

If like me, you have a Mac and a PC, or you need to download and upload files on the disk between Macs and PCs, which file-system do you format the drive to? Well, the cheap solution is to format the drive on a PC to the FAT32 file-system. This can then be read easily by both a Mac and a PC. However, FAT32 is now an old technology and has some annoying limitations. One being that it won't support files larger than 2GB. While fine for most users, if you work with audio or video like I do, this soon becomes an major problem. So what's the "not-so-cheap" solution? A company called MediaFour develop a program for Windows called "MacDrive". It cost me around £20, which isn't really bank-busting, and allows PCs to read Mac-formatted drives. Not only does the application support internal and external hard-drives formatted for Mac, it also reads Mac formatted CDs and DVDs and even Mac formatted iPods. Very useful!

However, this is all well and good until you take your Mac-formatted drive to a PC without MacDrive installed. I've never had to worry here, as I use the drive to transfer files between Uni and home. At Uni I use Macs and at home I use a Mac and my own PC with MacDrive. It may be worth carrying a copy of the program and your serial number round on a pen-drive, or if you will be transferring files on a regular basis, ask the user to buy MacDrive him/herself.

Anyway, the drive has been very reliable since day one, and has yet to fail me. While all hard disks do eventually fail, I have full trust in this one. It's never had any issues transferring files and is always fast through a FireWire connection. I've only ever used the USB connection once on a friend's PC and had no problems with the interface, the same just a tad slower... The drive is very quiet. There is no noticeable hum unless you place the side of the drive against something metal, and the motor noise is very low. This means that when transferring your files it doesn't sound as though the disk's about to cause a mini-earthquake on your desk!

I have to say, I would consider myself a rough and impatient user. I'm often in a hurry and chuck the drive about a bit. I sling it into my bag and it probably bounces about all over the place. As a result the drive is becoming covered in scratches. This does make the unit look a lot less attractive but I'm not all that bothered really - it's a hard disk! However, those more image-conscious buyers may benefit from giving theirs a bit of TLC to prevent a fashion disaster. I also find it annoying that the drive's power adapter is so clunky and awkward. It really impacts on the portablilty of the drive and burdens an extra cable on you.

Overall though, the drive is well put together, apart from those damn rubber feet, and looks very attractive. It's reliable and fast and with USB and FireWire you're not going to get any compatibility issues!

Well done Lacie, a great disk.

Well done Porsche, you rather sensibly devote more time to your cars, than your hard disks. Porsche drivers everwhere are grateful I'm sure. 

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