Others say...

"Easy setup, working in 10 minutes"
Received the Lacie Rugged 320GB yesterday (12/26/08),hooked it up to the MacBook did the formatting and had it backing up my hard drive in 10 minutes. Very simple and easy to use. The only thing that could be changed is a firewire cable that is not so large in diameter. Does get a little warm when doing a backup. Fits perfect into the Case Logic Hard Drive Case.

"USB connection is OK, Firewire connectivity is dodgy"
I bought one of these "triple interface" LaCie 250 gb "Rugged" drives off Amazon. Perhaps it's just mine that's defective, but mine kept having connection problems when linked to my computer using the Firewire 800 or 400 cables provided with the disk. However, the USB connection works great. So I'd recommend getting the USB only version instead. (My computer is a G4 Powerbook running Os X 10.5.6)

"Have Used the 120 GB Version of this HDD for 2 Years with Zero Problems"
Two years ago, I got the 120 GB version of this LaCie Rugged drive for my MacBook Pro. Since then, I have used it with the FireWire 400 interface almost exclusively. I have used the USB 2.0 interface as well, just not near as much so as to keep the 2 USB ports on my MacBook Pro available for other devices that do not support FireWire. In fact, this was one reason for my initial purchase - the flexibility of the triple-interface design.

I use this drive literally every day, as it stores my iTunes & iPhoto libraries, both of which are quite large. I also use it to carry these libraries to my desktop iMac for backup. The drive has performed flawlessly over the two years I have had it. Only once did it act like it had crashed (it wouldn't mount), but running DiskWarrior (an indespensible product if you have a Mac, BTW) on it & rebuilding the drive's directory structure resolved the problem. Since this was a logical (data) error instead of a physical / mechanical one, I do not pin this on the drive itself, but rather the OS or an application - Hence the "Zero problems" in the title of my review.

On top of this great functionality, I love the design of this drive. It looks very cool - I like the orange "bumpers" around the circumference of the drive contrasted against the silver body.

Bottom-line? I would buy another one of these drives in a second if I needed it.


"This Drive + Carbon Copy Cloner = bootable Mac backup (amazing)!"
This drive connected to my Mac through my Firewire 800 port, and is powered off of it. It also included USB 2.0 cable, Firewire 400 and 800 cables, and a USB power cable in case your computer can't power it through one port.

I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner for free (and then made a small donation because it's amazing), reformatted and partitioned this drive, and now have a bootable replica of my computer.

I run a MacBook Pro 15.4" 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM and ~160GB HD, and this was perfect for it. It had enough space to back up my hard drive completely and leave room for another storage partition.

Cons:

*Gets hot after demanding usage (when I transferred ~100GB to it) (but still is very, very quiet).

*Probably needs a case (I recommend the http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000HDJT4S Case Logic Case), because the ports are open to the elements, and when I'm on the go I get worried about them.

Overall:

Only had it for about a week, but in a few hours it has proved invaluable as it quickly copied my hard drive. Great for a Mac, too (my main computer).

"nice compact portable hard drive"
It is a great lightweight external hard drive when you're on the go. Works very well and is really light. Only 2 negatives are: it doesn't have an AC plug so it draws power from your laptop and hogs 2 usb ports (minor but still), second, I work on both MAC and PC and it automatically partitions its hard drive at set up as 80% PC, 20% Mac. Can't really change that. I wish it was totally plug and play on both platforms like its bulkier counterpart the black LaCie 500 GB. Other than that, it's nice and trendy looking.