Product Description

LaCie has teamed up with the renowned design agency Porsche Design to create this family of hard drives. With these drives now you've got a stylish place to put all of your music, videos and data. Set up is quick and easy. Within seconds, the LaCie Hard Drive is ready to start sharing on either PC or Mac.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14613 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: LaCie
• Model: 300968U
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 3.55 pounds
• Hard Disk: 320GB

Features

• LaCie 300968U 320GB P3 HD USB 2.0 7200RPM

From the Manufacturer

World-famous design
Exclusively designed by the renowned design agency Porsche Design GmbH, the LaCie Hard Drive exhibits world-class style and performance. The result of decades of technological expertise, these drives feature state-of-the-art design and awesome performance.

High-speed downloads
Available with a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 interface, the LaCie Hard Drive offers the fast interface transfer rates (up to 480Mbits/s using a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 connection) that are required for jobs like downloading digital photos, saving MP3s or transferring home videos from a camcorder.

Backup your system
With room to store up to 500GB, you can back up your entire system or add extra storage space when your internal hard drive is full. Built to be lightweight and durable, these drives can be easily moved for sharing and exchanging of files.

Easy to use
This drive offers nearly effortless setup and is ready to use just seconds after removing it from the box. Secure rubber feet allow drives to be stacked, so you can get the most out of limited desktop space.

Customer Reviews

Flawless through nine months now, plug and play w/o issue
It's no use to predict how a hard drive will perform down the road past three months of course, and by the time you read the 'down the road' reviews, it'll likely be undersized for your needs.

Regardless, this is a nice plug and play (no drivers needed, literally plug in and go on XP) drive with more than enough room to back up most peoples complete machines with 300gb+ of usable space. I reformatted it to NTFS w/o problem. It's a Hitachi drive; they've been very reliable in my experience. I'm using it to back up both my home server and laptop with room to spare. It's USB 2.0 only, so would be slow for everyday access use. It's the perfect backup drive though for now.

An update (7/7/07): This drive is still working flawlessly nine months in, and I'm still as happy with it as when I wrote the above review.

Revised Review -- Hard Drive Failure at Six Months and Follow Up
My original review is at the bottom. Here's my post-failure update:

LaCie sent me a new power adapter for the drive, no charge because the drive was still under warranty. The drive miraculously came back to life and stopped clicking. Their customer service was quick to respond to the problem. Again, the weakest link on this product literally seems to be the power supply and its weak connection to the drive.

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My original review is below. The drive worked well for about six months of light to moderate use. I never transported it, and I kept it in a well ventilated area. My reward? A metal brick. Tonight the drive made a horrible noise and the light on the front started flashing. Uh oh. The motor won't spin up. I'm kissing hundreds of hours of effort ripping backup copies of my CDs goodbye. I'll update this review again once I finish my customer service experience with LaCie -- the drive is still under warranty.

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I picked up a LaCie external 320GB drive lately, and it is working well. I have two Western Digital external drives, and both have served well. This drive was on a special at a local store -- under one hundred dollars -- so I couldn't pass it up.

This LaCie has a much smaller form factor than either WD drive.

It doesn't run too hot: after reformatting it to NTFS, it was only lukewarm. Not bad. For the most part, it feels well made.

It identifies on my Win XP Pro system as a Seagate 320GB drive. Seagate makes some decent hard drives, so if that's what LaCie has in this unit, it's a great deal.

It's quiet. There is a faint hum, but I've never heard a hard drive that is quieter.

The only thing I'd change is LaCie's proprietary power cord/plug. It doesn't feel that snug in the back of the drive. That's a minor quibble, though.

Looks like a steel brick, performance is just about as steady!
Nothing fancy about the design of this USB drive, but the performance is excellent. I've had mine in operation for over a year now, ever since the other brand (the unnamed ones who make zip drives) crapped out on me in just a few months, and lost nearly 250 meg of fansubbed anime.

When I bought my computer in 2005, I had no way of knowing that twin 160 Gig hard drives was not enought these days. After all my Win98 machine had been going for 7 years, and it only had 15 Gig of space. You quickly find out that with DVR's for media center, music (which I don't personally download) and video's for anime, tv programs, or just fun take up massive amounts of drive space. A good USB drive is needed, and so far so good with the LaCie.

The LaCie is easy to use and connect, very quiet and efficient, gives off little heat, and as you can see, looks just like a retangular metal brick. It has endured my overnight downloading, and watching and deleting videos for over a year now with no complaints. Sometimes USB HD's have problems if not spun down in a computer shutdown. This one never has any problem. On several occasions due to storms or computer glitches, the computer has reboot, even with the download bit torrent client running, the LaCie does not loose it's reference at all and comes back accurately when the system is brought back up, that's another thing my other unit couldn't do all the time.

I believe this drive is the perfect solution if you want to add one of those new digital tuners to your PC. 320 Gig is enough for even a lot of HD programs, and enough for hundreds of non-HD stuff. While I don't have an HD tuner, so I can't personally verify this, my experience with high grade avi files and divx files tells me you should be able to download and watch on this unit at the same time. The only problem comes if you are running too many downloads, but even there I believe the processor becomes the bottleneck, not the LaCie.