Advantages: Fast transfer speed, protection from knocks and drops
Disadvantages: Fairly high price

...The LaCie Rugged All-Terrain External 250 hard-drive is a portable storage device which will allow you to store 250gb of multimedia files such as pictures, music and video. You will obviously also be able to hold documents and other files as well (e.g. software installations). Measuring at 9 cm wide, 14.5 cm long, 2.5 cm in height and weighing just 250 grams, making the LaCie external hard-drive very light as well as portable. The hard-drive is portable in the way that it is very light, the only thing you have to take into account is that you will require a medium to large sized pocket or any form of bag in order to carry the device. You could always opt to just carrying it around in your hand, which is not very practical in everyday life. All external and internal hard-drives state a certain amount of memory capacity, but in fact... Read review

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Advantages: ,
Disadvantages: Failed and no guarantee from Lacie

...My drive failed only half way through its two year guarantee period. Lacie do not offer any data recovery only repair. I then found out that they will not honor their guarantee even after a specialist data recovery firm using all the required clean rooms recover the data. This means that all my data is either gone or I have to pay nearly £1000 for the data recovery and then pay again for the drive to be repaired. With these drives they house 2x 500gb drives and this means twice the price for data recovery. On speaking to the data recovery experts they have seen a huge increase in Lacie drives being sent in due to failure and have advised that these do not handle the data well they should do. Very Poor... Read review

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Advantages: none
Disadvantages: brokes and burns everything is connected to it

...My incredible story with a Raid LaCie Biggest Quadra Fw 800. I bought a Raid LaCie Biggest Quadra Fw 800 in June 2007 at Ktuin store(the biggest retailer of Mac and LaCie in Spain) in Madrid Calle Orense for 1079,00€. As soon as I took it out from the box and I connetted it to my Powerbook G4 and my MacPro the drive burn them out. Some smoke came out from the firewire socket. Three months later LaCie gave me a new Raid LaCie Biggets Quadra Fw 800.They didn't pay anything for the damage caused to my 2 computers. Luckily the Macpro was still in warranty. Mac fixed it for free but still I had to pay 700€ to fix the Powerbook. Well, I put the brand new Raid LaCie Biggest Quadra Fw800 on my desk and I saved there all my last 5 years of work as a photographer. I also configurated it in raid 5. I didn't make any back up because: 1) I... Read review

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Advantages: reliable, quick to use
Disadvantages: A bit large for day to day use

...I have had this hard-drive for a far while now and i must say that i have been very happy with it. It isn't anything special and there aren't really any advantages over other portable hard-drives. However it's main asset is it's reliabilty. This relaiblity is what makes me reccommend this hard-drive to potential buyers. For me it is better to have a storage device that will work everytime you connect it to the computer rather than something flashy which looks stylish - not to say that the lacie is hideous. In terms of performance the lacie ticks all the boxes again. It is quickly found by the computer as soo as its connected and then its very easy to find in the 'My Computer' folder. Conncetion is done by either/both wires which are both USB compatible, on older computers i found i had to connect both wires but on my relatively new... Read review

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Advantages: Probably the biggest drive for consumer use
Disadvantages: Takes some time to defragment or format

.... Transferring data is the fastest you’ll get with current technology. That being USB 2.0, Firewire and Firewire 800. All these standards are supported here. There is also an 8mb buffer built into the drive instead of the standard LaCie offering of 2mb. A big plus point. You’ll need the program built in to Windows XP to partition this drive (Click on: Programs/Administrative tools/Computer management then click Disk management) or, if you have Windows 98, ME some software is supplied. You may not want to partition it anyway but it’s good to know that it can be done. Mac users software is also supplied on CDROM along with a huge user guide for MAC and PC which can be printed out and is very useful indeed. I never knew that you could do so much with a hard disk drive, it seems to be capable of most things connectivity and feature wise... Read review

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Advantages: Brilliant color, and sharpness suitable for DTP and graphics use.
Disadvantages: It takes time to set the color temperature correctly, does not feature professional color profiles.

...dominance to all the factory presets bar one, I was forced to tweak away and create my own profiles using callibration software, something that took well over an hour, eventually I was able to get satisfactory results. Displays of this quality within this price range don't come around often enough, I have no regrets whatsoever after having made this purchase. I will make LaCie one of my more trusted display brands as a result, alongside Sony, and Dell.... Read review

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Advantages: Value for money, Looks, capacity
Disadvantages: Scratches, Rubber feet fall off, NO aftersales support (worth mentioning)

...LaCie have obviously marketed this external drive at the people who want both a functional computer system and a good-looking one. The drive has been designed with F. A. Porsche and has a nice minimalist look to it, a metallic grey case with all most mirrored front the drive looks great, even better when stacked with another one. With only one LED on the front your not left with loads of bright lights flashing at you when your trying to keep the room dark when playing games or movies. The drive is also very quiet to the point where you need to look at the light to ensure its still on. LaCie have released the drive in a range of sizes with a range of connection such as USB and Firewire so whatever your need you should be able to find a drive to suit. I personally purchased the 250GB as it was both the largest and best value for money... Read review

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Advantages: idea
Disadvantages: performance

...that the promised specs were true. After many time waiting due to the difficulty of getting this unit in spain, I finally got the drive, and then all the surprises came. The unit is in general terms very slow; we use a normal ethernet LAN and the performance compared with other drives is very poor. Even the connection via USB is very slow, nothing to do with the [theoric] 400MB speed you may get with a normal USB disk. The web interface is also very slow, so slow indeed that many times you think that the unit is broken because of its unresponsiveness. I started multiple trheads with Lacie support and all ended in confirming the poor performance of the unit; they do not officially or non-oficially stated at any time this, but followed the typical customer support technique of getting you tired of getting nothing solved. They sayed for example... Read review

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Advantages: Very quick with firewire, quiet (no fan), sturdy and well-built, 4-6-pin firewire lead, looks cool!
Disadvantages: No backup/partitioning software included

...My laptop hard disk had recently been playing up, with sectors becomming corrupt all over the place. So I thought it was time to buy a decent external backup drive, with enough space for future storage needs. Luckily my laptop has a 4 pin Firewire connector so I knew backing up the 30GB of data wouldn't take too long, compared to using the USB 1.1 port. (take note: with some Firewire drives you may need to buy a 4-to-6 pin adaptor/lead for laptop use). After doing some research, and having previously used LaCie drives at an old design studio job and being impressed with them, I decided the D2 250GB was for me. It has 3 connectors: USB 2.0 (compatible with USB 1.1 but of course is slower), Firewire 400, and the new Firewire 800 (Apple only, but hopefully the PC will adopt the faster Firewire standard in time). I bought the largest HD I... Read review

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Advantages: Extremely easy to set up and it works
Disadvantages: Power supply a bit clunky but not a real problem

...This Lacie drive looks very nice when taken out of the box - designed by Porsche - minimalist styling etc etc but that isn't worth anything unless it works. All I can say is that I had it up and running with all my data and backups from my hard disk within about 2 minutes of plugging in the USB. My PC is 3 years old running XP with all the Service packs and was slowing down because of the amount of space taken up by my old stuff - a lot of scans eBay and other stuff. My hard disk is a mere 120 GB so this neat little box has more than double its capacity. There is a CD provided with software to instal it - but I didn't even need that - plugged it in - was recognised immediately -assigned Drive letter and name LACIE and that was that. As far as the design goes it sits on the floor underneath the PC so the design doesn't matter... Read review

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