Others say...

"I would recommend against this one"
I purchased this drive about 9 months ago and used it primarily for storing video. I had it hooked up on a 24in iMac via firewire 800. Blah blah same horror story, drive breaks etc... Long story short, I sent it in to get fixed while under warranty. I got it back and they had done absolutely nothing to it. It still would not mount, made the horrible buzzing noise and showed less than half capacity. This was 7 days ago. I'm still waiting to see if they will replace (not repair) the drive for me.

Now I can't say that my experience with the drive is indicative of the product at large. It is possible that I had one of the few defective ones. However, I think that my experience with LaCie's support team speaks to their incompetence. How could a repair center possibly forget to REPAIR the drive?? I literally believe they never touched the thing. If you have multiple external drives like I do then you know that eventually you are going to have problems with one of them. Its just nice to know that you have somene who can fix the problem. In this case I have nowhere to turn for that kind of help. LaCie, stay away from 'em...

"Pleased so far"
I have been a pretty devoted fan of Western Digital MyBook hard drives. However, I wanted a large drive to use for Time Machine that had firewire 800, and the Lacie beat the MyBook's in price and specs for my needs. I am glad I went with this drive - it has been great so far. Performance is as expected on FW800 - very fast! It is a bit large, but overall pretty slick looking drive as well.

Only complaint would be that the fan seems to make some noise at times. If I tap the case when it is doing it, it will usually stop - but a bit annoying none the less. Could just be mine though - I cannot imagine they all do this.

"Best external hd I've ever had."
Contrary to some other reviews I've read (not on Amazon), this drive runs very quiet and cool. If you're fortunate enough to have a firewire 800 interface, it runs twice as fast as USB 2. The enclosure and stand are well designed, and perfectly complement a Mac Pro. The cables and power supply are heavy duty as opposed to the flimsy junk that comes with some other drives I've had. I've had one in service on my Mac Pro which runs 24/7 since last May as a Time Machine backup. I leave the LaCie on all the time also. It sits on top of the Mac, looks cool, and runs even cooler and quieter than the Mac, which is saying something. No problems to date, so I've purchased a second one to back up my Windows machines. 5 stars for sure!


"1tB disc"
1 Terabyte La Cie Big Disc is a great storage medium. Connecting to Apple Macbook is easy. Works fast, reliable.

"Windows Users Beware!"
This drive was the most difficult to install of any external hard drive I've ever added to a system. Installation took about one and a half hours and it required a utility from Seagate.

My system is a Dell Precision T7400 Window XP 64 Workstation with 16GB of RAM and a 2TB RAID 0 hard drive. I consider myself very knowledgeable about computers, especially those with Windows OS's. I am adding this LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ external hard drive to increase my backup capabilities.

I first tried connecting over FireWire 400. I received a message that my device did not install properly. I tried this several times, using both of the disks supplied with the device. Unfortunately, neither disk contained any drivers or utilities to help my system see the drive. One disk contained Retrospect Express. I already have the real version of Retrospect, which is a great program, so I didn't need the watered-down version. The other "Utilities" disk contained nothing but manuals.

So I opened the manuals and found that the drive is shipped formatted for MAC; I would need to reformat the drive using Windows Disk Management. Unfortunately, this utility reported that it could not format the drive because of an internal error. I tried several iterations of this before giving up.

Then I tried to connect to the drive over USB. This time, my system reported that the drive was ready to use. But it wasn't. It still needed to be formatted. Again I tried Windows Disk Management and again I got the same errors.

What now? I remembered that one of my Seagate drives came with a utility to manage disks called `Seagate Disk Wizard'. I opened it and it immediately found the LaCie disk and asked me if I wanted to use it. Well, I sure did! It reported that there was an error writing to a sector, but allowed me to ignore the error. This was probably the error that stymied the Windows utility. However, the Seagate Disk Wizard was able to complete anyway, despite the error.

The disk was now formatted and ready to use - over USB. Dare I disconnect and try over FireWire 400? Of course I dare! Luckily, the connection over FireWire 400 worked fine this time - now that the disk was formatted. My system recognized the disk and I am now using it over FireWire 400, as I had intended.

SUMMARY: I got the drive to work, but it was a chore. I could not achieve this using LaCie's directions, but had to resort to a third party utility. I would not recommend this drive for the average Windows computer user who is used to `Plug and Play'. However, I may buy another one for myself, now that I understand how to make it work.