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Do you use LaCie external hard drive ?


  • Total voters
    61
Yes.

Any reason you want to know?

Because there is this other guy on the forum that asked for recommendations on external hard drive and I want to convince him that, in my view, they are the best.
 
I use one (not sure of the model number, but looks exactly like this). It's for transfer purposes only. I use it to transfer large amounts of data between my PC and my MBP, so it's formatted FAT32 and is only there for convenience. It's just faster than transferring over the network. Haven't had any problems thus far and that's with constant connect/disconnects.
 
Because there is this other guy on the forum that asked for recommendations on external hard drive and I want to convince him that, in my view, they are the best.

I use a couple of them and they are good, but remember that LaCie only makes the enclosure. The drives inside are from Seagate, Western Digital and all the other drive manufacturers.

What sets LaCie apart for me personally is that they are one of the few drive enclosure manufacturers that consistently offer a large range of enclosures with FireWire interfaces.

Cheers.
 
I use a couple of them and they are good, but remember that LaCie only makes the enclosure. The drives inside are from Seagate, Western Digital and all the other drive manufacturers.

What sets LaCie apart for me personally is that they are one of the few drive enclosure manufacturers that consistently offer a large range of enclosures with FireWire interfaces.

Cheers.

Yes you are right. Same story for Apple, really.
 
I used to, but it seems their QA has gone down a bit over the last few years.
Now I prefer to buy my own HDs and enclosures.


We purchased two SAFE drives (biometric protected HDs) for evaluation last week and I broke mine in less than 1 day, and my colleague broke his in less than 2.
 
I used to, but it seems their QA has gone down a bit over the last few years.
Now I prefer to buy my own HDs and enclosures.


We purchased two SAFE drives (biometric protected HDs) for evaluation last week and I broke mine in less than 1 day, and my colleague broke his in less than 2.

Did you purchase LaCie hard drives ? Is it worth it the biometric thing ? I mean, if you do gardening and your skin cracks, would it still recognize your finger ?
 
I think the hardware & software implementation is poor, at best.
It appears that the biometric info is stored on the computer, not on the drive, at least the version we purchased. Which makes the issue of portability an issue.
When you config the unlocking software, you scan 2 fingers for each account.


In my mind, it's not worth it, it's just fancy-schmancy.

If I have an encrypted .dmg, all I need is a Mac and password and I'm good to go. I can even back up the .dmg to be safe.
With this biometric thing, you're screwed if the hardware fails, and you basically need 2 of them to back up data.
 
I think the hardware & software implementation is poor, at best.
It appears that the biometric info is stored on the computer, not on the drive, at least the version we purchased. Which makes the issue of portability an issue.
When you config the unlocking software, you scan 2 fingers for each account.


In my mind, it's not worth it, it's just fancy-schmancy.

If I have an encrypted .dmg, all I need is a Mac and password and I'm good to go. I can even back up the .dmg to be safe.
With this biometric thing, you're screwed if the hardware fails, and you basically need 2 of them to back up data.

Cheers mate. I will not consider one of them.
 
I never understood the supposed poor quality reputation of LaCie. I've used 3-4 drives and never had a problem with any of them. Good value imho.
 
I have a 20GB USB drive that's still going after 7 or 8 years.

Wow respect :cool: Generally external hard drive fail pretty quick. I don't know why but that is one reason I prefer putting my money into reliable products such as a Apple Mac and LaCie.

I never understood the supposed poor quality reputation of LaCie. I've used 3-4 drives and never had a problem with any of them. Good value imho.

Most of the people I know, just said good things about LaCie. One of the things is that LaCie is dedicated more to the Apple users, and thats is why they design there products to look good. And they like Firewire :)
 
I never understood the supposed poor quality reputation of LaCie. I've used 3-4 drives and never had a problem with any of them. Good value imho.

I've had 5 since about 1996. All failed. On 3 of them, the enclosure went "bad". That's 60% failure rate.
I won't even tell you the failure rate on drives purchased for work (it's triple digits).

On the 4 OEM enclosures & HDs I've purchased since 2000, all are fully functional. And much cheaper.
 
This poll may favour LaCie users because they are the most likely to open the thread. That said, I voted yes.

I've not had problems with my year old 320GB Porsche enclosure, but have a friend whose 500GB locked up last month. Personally, I'm expecting to pick up a Mac Mini-styled LaCie just as soon as they have a 1TB version.
 
I've never purchased just because it seemed like some kind of no name brand thing. I currently have a WD MyBook & a Seagate orange and black one (cant remember the name). Although seeing some of the praise here maybe I will pick up LaCie sometime. I love external drives.
 
I've never purchased just because it seemed like some kind of no name brand thing. I currently have a WD MyBook & a Seagate orange and black one (cant remember the name). Although seeing some of the praise here maybe I will pick up LaCie sometime. I love external drives.

Yea, you are right, I felt the same at the beginning. It is a small company and I believe they started a few years ago (please correct me if I am wrong).

Anyway, like I already said, they are really well built. All metal and you could drop them, no problem. The air system is well thought (because of the design). LaCie hard drive at first look, seem weird, but once it is beside your Mac Pro or iMac, then you feel the power and the elegant side of them (LaCie).
 
I used to use a G-Tech 320gb quad-interface drive, but it crashed on my and now I use a 1Tb big disk extreme with triple interface from LaCie. Definitely a great purchase. I had a scare with it, but that was easily fixed when I changed from FAT32 to Apple Journal formatting.
 
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