Home > Consumer Reviews > LaCie 301848U USB 2.0 Neil Poulton 1TB Rugged XL eSATA External Hard Drive

The drive works fine, as expected. No problems at all. However, being a big fan of the smaller 2.5" rugged drives, I bought this sight unseen without reading the description. Turns out it's a 3.5" drive in a much larger enclosure that looks exactly like the smaller ones in a picture but is actually much larger. I'm an admitted bonehead, so it's my fault but I'm taking off a star for the drive looking exactly like the smaller version that has become a bit of a standard around Hollywood.

Also, there's now no express card slots in the new MacBook Pros, so you can't use esata at all. Not a good drive if you're looking to use it with a new Macbook Pro.

I recently got a new laptop with an ESATA port. I use this hard drive to make periodical backups for my computer. My laptop has ~250GB worth of stuff on it, so it saves a lot of frustration for an impatient guy like me when the transfer speed is so high. It's also pretty nice that it has USB compatibility as well. My previous computer was an old clunker from 2001, so it didn't have an ESATA port. When I got the new computer, I was able to use the USB connection to copy the files from the old computer onto the external drive, then use the ESATA connection to transfer that to the new computer (and at a faster speed, to boot.)
My only real complaint about this product? You can't use the ESATA and USB connections at the same time.

This product is very well made and works fine and i exspect it too keep working for a very long time. however the one thing i dnt like is the software on it that i dnt know how to take off... it keeps it from being used with other forms of technology like and xbox 360 or playstation 3. those systems dnt recognize it and it sucks because i used to watch movies on the tv through the external so as far as im concerned its a computer only external. It has a large amount of space which is a plus for a great price for something soo solid. A++++

I bought the drive around 2 weeks ago. I ported all my data to it and now suddenly it's not working (computer won't recongize it). I have suffered a HUGE loss of data.

When I pick up the drive I feel a strong magnetic field that wasn't there before. Most likely it's related to the failure.

This unit has a strong look. But it has the same trouble of all external hard drive. The energy turn off and the port USB soen't work until today. I do not loss the information because the SATA port to works.
I never will use this units again