Home > Consumer Reviews > LaCie, Desktop Drive , Design by F.A Porsche, 500GB, 7200RPM, USB2, Mac and PC, Plug and Play

This was my third Lacie Hard Drive to add to my 80GB and 250GB versions. This is now selling for significantly less than my 80 GB one a few years back! All three have been trouble free, though unlike one viewer, I have not tested its resistance to being dropped. I have also used a competitors hard drive to which I turned the power off after my computer crashed while data was being transfered. I lost all the data (it was just a back-up so could re-load) and had to re-format it. When defragmenting, there seems to be a portion of the disk not being used. I trust my Lacie hard drives more - just don't drop it while it is on!

I was unsure about getting this hard drive reading some of the reviews, but in the end i decided to go for it, and follow up with a full review.

i must say 5 star to amazon too, delivery was fast and was well packaged as usual with amazon.

now for the hard drive, first thing i notice is the size, it is alot smaller than it looks in the images, infact the images just do not show the beauti of the styling on this little hard drive, looks really good.

What concerned me with this hard drive before purchase when reading other people review, was things like "hard drive fell and broke, power cable is dodgy, the fan is noisy"

After i unpacked it and powered up, everything was just perfect the power cable was fine and caused no problems, still haven't noticed the noise of the fan, it's very silent, with the hard drive falling, i haven't experience that part :- ) but the hard drive has very well build rubber feet that sits just right on top of my pc tower.

i have a 500W logitech surround sound system and the subwoofer doesn't even move the hard drive, so if it falls and brake TBH, that would be your fault.

One thing i would mention, that is NOT a down side, is that the provided USB cable is just about long enough to put the hard drive on top of your PC tower and no where else. i'm sure we all have this cable at home being used for something else and we can all make a quick swap and everything is just fine.

To round everything up i would say this little bit of storage is serious bang for the buck. I've never once said "yeah it's okay for the price" like i usualy do with cheaper things, it's just perfect.

I give it 10 out of 10 for style and proformance.

I use 5 external hard drive to back up data on each of my computers. I have had 3 hard drive failures in the past year. Backing up large files of irreplacable photgraphic data is not an option, its a must for me.

This 500Gb drive was the best GB per £ I could find. That is, it was the cheapest against even ebay sources. Do not confuse the word cheap with the quality of this unit. It is excellent in all respects.

It is a stainless steel look metal drive box with good cooling slots and radiates heat very well.

This is the quietest drive I have.

I did not buy it for looks but it is functional minimimalism in personification.

The psu is small and neat with a standard two prong socket.

The usb lead is a little short at just under 60cm, ok if just sitting on top of the machine you want to back up, but is identical to my pleathora of printer leads, so easily patched to other machines.

The on/off button has a deep travel and may defeat large fingers on first attempt. A ball point pen top works well here.

NOTE... The drive comes formatted as FAT32. If you want files larger than 4gb on windows, reformat as NTFS- that's what I did to prevent error messages about my large video files.

I don't think it will leave a stain on your wallet either.

I got this for christmas - not much of a surprise as I both picked it out and helped my mum pay for it.

It seemed wonderful, very easy, etc - so I put all my memories on there - all my pictures (and there were thousands), music, films, etc.

Now, it refuses to work. It hasn't been dropped, exposed to anything untoward etc.. just literally beeps at me, makes some loud fan noises and refuses to connect with my computer.
And it's not me being bad with computers - I know what I'm doing, and I've had several other people to try to fix it, but to no avail.

So, all my photos and music are stuck on the hard drive and I think I've lost them forever.

This is a huge disappointment and I just wish I could get everything back off of it. And it's upset me.

But hey, it looks good, so maybe it could be of some use as a paperweight?

Bought this a couple of months ago following purchase of Windows Vista computer with larger hard drive so wanted it primarily for back up. Had previously used LaCie 80GB external hard drive which had been easy to use and reliable.

This 500GB was easy to install - just plugged in and it recognised the external drive straight away. Have used for weekly backups. No problems so far and very cheap for the storage compared with others.