Home > Consumer Reviews > LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ 2 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/FireWire 800 Desktop External Hard Drive 301201U

All my Lacie's have been running solid for a long time. In four years I've had one drive failure and another had a bad FW interface. So I swapped the good drive into the good chassis and I guess I'm only one down.
These are used at our editing facility moving large files day in and day out on Apple G4's and G5's. They get man-handled a lot but have stood up well. I recommend to anyone not to "hot plug" any devices even if they are "hot pluggable." And don't leave your FW cables hanging off your equipment, all it takes is a little static electricity and the interface can get zapped.

This is a fantastic drive for any user, although it's set up for Macs out of the box. It couldn't be simpler to set up (plug it in, switch it on, use it), it's blazingly fast (especially for Firewire 800), and its all-metal construction keeps it quiet during use. I haven't used it with a PC, but it should be a snap to reformat it, install the provided drivers and get going.

In addition to its speed and capacity, a very convenient feature is a three-position switch that selects between the drive being "on", "off" or "auto", the latter meaning that the drive automatically sleeps and wakes with the Mac. No software needs to be installed on Macs, but LaCie bundles some applications which add convenience features for backing up and so on.

This drive is phenomenal value for money, especially if you spring for the 1 TB size: I can't recommend it highly enough.

This is the 9th Lacie hard drive I have bought (going back to three 120s that are over 5 years old) and I continue to use all nine. Knock on titanium, I have never had a problem with any of them. And they are used for very intensive professional video editing mostly. I also had several at the school I used to work at and none of them had a problem and they took a beating also. I've had two internals go bad in different Mac machines but never a problem with the Lacies. I still back up everything (sometimes in multiple locations) because of the "not if, but when" theory of hard drives but these things chug along year after year.

Bought this drive 2 months ago. Hooked it up with the USB cable. Shared the drive for my home network. Half the time the drive was not recognized with my W2k OS on bootup. I had to press the blue button on front to power down, the press it again to power up, then re-share the drives. Got ANNOYED! I bought a Firewire 800 3 port PCI card for the W2k computer, hooked it to the LaCie, and haven't had a problem since. I tried a 500GB file xfr from the internal HDD to the Lacie with the USB cable, and then the FW800. The FW800 was almost 3X faster. Learn from my mistake. If you're paying upwards of $400 for this drive, spend the extra money and get a Firewire interface for your PC. And make sure it's a Firewire 800 interface. Then you'll need the 9-pin cable..... By the way, I found the 1TB wasn't enough for all the video I want to record off my cable TV, so I bought 2 LaCie 2TB drives to complement the 1TB. Sounds like a lot, 5 terabytes! Yeah, just start saving .mpg's - recording the complete 1-9 seasons of the X-files would use up half my first TB drive! Just be sure to follow the instructions TO THE LETTER in the User Guide (on the LaCie CD), not the Quick Start guide. Use the quick format option with W2k.
5-1-08: Had a drive fail. Went to the Lacie website and followed the troubleshooting guides. Determined that the failure was in the power supply, which is located in the power cord. Called Lacie support and waited for about 20 minutes on hold. Explained the problem to the techrep and had no problem at all getting a new PS sent to me. Didn't even have to send the old one back. Lacie support gets 5 stars from me.

I've had multiple problems with this drive and would recommend that you look at alternatives. About 9 months after purchasing the drive, it froze up on my. Could not get it to respond after rebooting and you could hear a "click, click, click" sound coming from it. I contacted LaCie support, they diagnosed the problem as a bad power supply, and sent me a new one. LaCie support was very good and have nothing but praise for it. However, the drive went bad on me again, this time all my shares went bad, and again I cannot access the admin area for the drive. Since the drive is now out of warranty, I'm out of luck. All of my backups and other stored data is forever gone. I can't tell you how much I lost. Years of digital photos, archived music, documents all gone. I would not trust all my digital personal possessions to a LaCie device again.