LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive80 GB – Customer Reviews

First, this HD words fine on 4 PCs and my Macbook Pro G5.Not all computers can power portable devices, so check your manual first or test something else out on it.Even a 3 year old Sony laptop powered it.

Ruggedness:

This thing takes a likin and keeps on tickin.I'm a college student and wanted to be able to edit pictures on-the-go instead of confined into my room, but still maintain speed, reliability, and size.I use it almost exclusively for my Aperture photo library, and I must say it its quite fast.I've dropped it a few times and throw it in my computer backpack with my MacBook Pro and its with throughout the day around my campus.

I got it because of the sturdiness and the fact that's its one of the few portable, but powered FW800 drives, allowing fast transfers with large files, as well as daisychaining other devices to it without slowdown in speed; I have confirmed this through my own informal testing with 100gb transfers.I love that there is no AC adapter but its just as fast as most external powered drives, except maybe my Lacie RAID drive at home.

With Photoshop and Aperture:

If you've ever gone into the Photoshop settings, you'll notice it recommends to have a scratch disk separate from the disk Photoshop is on.Also, most pros know to have even the pictures on a separate disk for optimal speed.Aperture and Photoshop go must faster with this disk hooked up, since the built in drive isn't bouncing around between Photoshop, system, and picture files.Also, since Aperture views and manipulates a lot of photos at once, I've notices a serious speed advantage when using FW400, FW800, and USP in my own testing with this drive.

Triple Interface:

The FW800 is fantastic.I hook it to my big external raid drive at home.You can actually daisychain another device to it, either a FW400 or FW800, depending on the port you use.The other device can be powered too.So you don't necessarily need a second FW800 like on bigger hard drives to do daisychaining.

I've hooked my Rugged HD directly to my notebook, with a big hard drive hooked to that, with my scanner and printer hooked to the big hard drive.Meaning, I have 4 devices hooked to my itty bitty HD without loss of speed: yup, while printing, I still got transfer speeds of almost 60mb per second.

This also means I don't need to use a hub.

Speed Testing:

This depends for every HD; 1GB of little files transfers faster than one 1GB file.But I get between 35mb and 60mb per second on 100gb transfers.My old Firelite USG got about 12-15mb per/s, and a more modern cheap Western digital got 20-25.There is a difference between all three interfaces.My Lacie RAID gets up to 80mb/sec.

Overall:

Yes it's a little pricey, but the thing is fast and durable.Plus, the much more fragile G-Techs, the only other big name FW800 portable drives, are even more money.If you need something that goes with you on the go quite frequently and is fast, this is the drive for you.And if your notebook had FW800, don't skip out on spending the extra money on this one.The HD is a little bigger than most portable HD, but it has more airspace inside to protect the disk from impact.To most people, the size difference isn't that noticeable.

Oh yes, and the rubber ring stays on secure, but is pretty easy to take off, and has screws going around so you can probably put a bigger drive into it in the future.

9/25/2006 12:00 AM | Rating: