I’m in the process of getting my oldest daughter ready to head off to college. She will need a hard drive for backup and I wanted to get her something small and portable. My search led me to the Lacie Rugged All-Terrain 500GB Hard Drive. Besides being built to take a beating, the thing that I really like about this drive is the triple interface! It has Firewire 800, Firewire 400 and USB 2. It’s also bus powered over all 3 interfaces so there is no need to plug in a power supply to the drive itself.
Setup
Although the drive comes with a setup utility to format it for your platform, I formatted it myself using Disk Utility on the Mac. I wanted to partition it so that there would be a large Time Machine partition and a smaller partition for temporary files or a bootable emergency system.
The Bottom Line
As far as portable drives go, this one has everything I wanted and it’s in a rugged case. You get all 3 cables (Firewire 800, 400 and USB2) The only downside is that it’s a 5400 rpm drive instead of 7200 rpm. The other thing I was quite happy with was the price! The 500GB version of this drive is only $144.95 here. If orange is not your color you can order a set of different color bumpers.
SOLD !!!
LaCie are not favourites in my book right now, but in truth what I experienced could happen with any hard drive manufacturer. My LaCie D2 hard drive went dead on me and while I had most of the data backed up on DVD’s my preference was to try recover the data on the HD.
Those who’ve faced this before know that it’s a Catch 22 situation. If you send the drive in for repair under warranty they lose your data, or if you open up the case to access the bare drive your warranty is then void. So I opened up the case and got lucky in being able to run the bare drive (a Western Digital) and access all data to enable a proper backup to be made.
But it raises the question – is there a Hard Drive unit out there with a warranty which will include saving your data when its the case that is faulty and the bare drive still functions?
Very interesting…I’ve been looking for a good external backup drive…would it be good for PC too??
Holly,
yes it comes out of the box ready to be setup for Mac or PC.
Terry,
Ken again here from yesterday about the Mac thing. I think in time (when the bucks come in) to make the switch….
I do run mainly Adobe AppsCS4. If I went laptop first, how would or would spec it out to get the performance needed for Adobe “stuff”? or do you suggest start with a desktop?
Ken
PS hard drive a good deal, thanks.
I have had one of these for a while, and I find that mine gets very hot!
Have an older model…..using as a paper weight now…..
Mine is going off to College too. Very very hard.
I have LaCie. I saw it on Chase Jarvis’ piece on his laptop.
For my daughter I decided on a Western Digital (powered) drive for $70 at Staples. I keep thinking I should’ve gotten a portable because she has a laptop. But we’ll see.
Good luck to you in this next phase.
ad
I recently purchase the Lacie eGo version. So far so good.
http://mydl.me/2009/07/new-ego-mac-edition/
Thanks for this just what we needed, ordered one. How can we backup photos when they are spread out in many different directories on the computer? A type of backup program that searches the computer (recurse all folders) for certain file types.
Thanks for yourt time. Enjoy the weekend!
I’m sure there are backup apps that let you specify folders (maybe even searches), but the best solution is to not worry about it and backup the entire drive regularly. Thanks!
Terry,
I have had and many other have had problems with this drive not even mounting on Macs. I can mount it on a Windows machine, though.
I run OS X 10.5.8 on a G4 1.25 Mini and get nothing, nada, zilch . It does power up but no recognition by the OS, no desktop icon and no install application from LaCie, and nothing in System Profiler either.
What was the config you used that got it to mount?
Hi, first off I formatted the drive myself using Disk Utility (2 partitions). Then I used it on a MB and MBP running 10.5.8 & 10.6. No problems to date other than a bad cable that it came with (FW400z).