18.7.2018

Read all the way to the end for the full picture here :LaCie is a long-running brand name in (expensive) external drives, and as the first one I've owned I have to say I'm pretty underwhelmed for the price. The drive is bundled with an external power adaptor (more on this in a minute; already that's bad news), a pile of wall-socket adaptors for the UK, USA and most of Europe, a spare dust cover for the exposed sockets, an orange USB-C to USB-C cable, and a plain black USB3.1/3.0 to USB-C cable. The rugged aspect I'm less concerned about as I generally don't go around dropping or kicking expensive electronics. As a side note, the supplied cables & power adaptor aren't very long,so you'll need to be quite near a socket.I tested this with a new (5 months old) custom high-end gaming PC build - a Coffee Lake i7 8700K on an ASUS Strix Z370-G motherboard with 16GB of DDR4. I have two SSDs installed - a Sandisk 512GB and a Crucial M4 256GB; boot times for this machine are under 30 seconds from cold on the Z370 chipset.In theory, installing the LaCie is very easy - you boot up your PC, connect the cables, and that's largely it - the drive will be ready for storage (3.68TB formatted). For a kick off, my PC's front and rear USB3.0 connectors don't supply enough juice to power the drive, so there goes your portability right away - unless you've got native USB-C ports on your PC or Mac, you need a wall-socket. This is hugely disappointing for a start. Once you start it up, you're informed that the drive is dual-formatted (ExFAT) for Mac and PC, and that "optimising" it for one or the other will require reformatting which will wipe the contents - which are all first-time setup utilities. If you're not an experienced user, you'll want to think twice here (the first-time setup utilities will also try to flog you data-backup subscriptions). After I "optimised" the drive, I didn't notice any difference in performance. I copied a few 2.5GB files onto the drive and got write-speeds of 27mb/sec with bursts up to 35mb/sec - so it's roughly as fast as a USB flash drive. The card reader is standard SD, so you'll need an adaptor if you want to use any microSD flash cards - an adaptor isn't supplied with the drive, BTW.I've never been a fan of systray utilities using up my RAM, and the LaCie has at least 2 that can do this for you - RAID utilities (more on this in a sec) and....some....other.....thing that shouldn't be necessary as really, all you should need is file explorer for basic file backups - You can, however, set them up not to start at boot, which is a reasonable compromise. The drive is apparently two HDs pre-configured in RAID-0 (I got this from reading the box, and there really needs to be some supplied documentation to help you out here), which emphasises drive speed but leaves you vulnerable to losing everything if one of the pair ever fails. It also means I'll need to install the RAID manager software to either split the drives or reconfigure it into RAID-1 instead, although I suppose this means it's actually 2x4TB HDs as RAID-0 requires two identical drives to work and doesn't stack the drive sizes.EDIT : I have played around with this drive and gotten very different results from initially directly out of the box.Inside the casing is two, 2TB drives - presumably Seagate Barracudas, from some reading around, although I don't know the exact model. I used LaCie's RAID manager software (downloadable from their support page) and have rebuilt the drive as both RAID-0 and RAID-1 for testing. You can also configure it as two coimpletely independent drives in JBOD ("Just a bunch of disks") mode. Whenever you do this, you're warned the rebuild will erase everything and you'll need a pin to depress a tiny reset button on the front of the drive next to the power socket.In RAID-0 mode, you get a single 4TB partition - contrary to what I thought, you get the sum of the drives (although as RAID-0 striping puts half the data on one drive and half on the other, this still doesn't add up in my mind, but still). Writing to and copying from the RAID-0 partition after installing the management software, I got much faster speeds than previously - about 230mb/s, or 10x as fast as the first time I used it.In RAID-1 mode, the drive shows up as two mirrored 2TB drives (1.86TB formatted each). Read & write speeds were about half what I got in RAID-0 mode; about 130mb/sec.In light of all this, I've added a star, but there should really be a bit more advice available in the box - specifically, there's still no downloadable manual, little info on specs, and it's really rather important that after the first time you install this drive, you reboot and install the RAID manager. By default, in RAID-0, if one of the internal drives fails, you still lose everything, and I'd think it's quite important to tell users this - if you didn't know any better, you'd just see a single 4TB partition. And, I'm still disappointed that this isn't fully bus-powered if you're using USB3.0 or above (= minus 1 star).

15.1.2019

Thought I'd redress the poor three star overall rating this drive had in Jan of 2019... it deserves better.I have a Apple Mac with USB3 ports.... (also thunderbolt which are Thunderbolt 2) but I'll be upgrading soon and the new Macs have only got USB-C - so this drive will be compatible for a while on this basis. Meanwhile, if you have USB3 ports (which most people do am guessing) then this drive works perfectly. The cable it ships with is USB-C to standard USB so this is a highly compatible drive generally. These cables are available everywhere for buttons if you wanted some spares....Try not to get confused about Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt 3 uses the USB-C connectors - so I'm guessing some people are tripping up on this.

7.3.2017

I have a slightly uneasy relationship with external hard drives, lulled into a state of permanent trust, and forgetting that all the ones I have had seem to have a limited shelf-life, as far as automatic, continuous back up is concerned. And I'm not sure i expect the LaCie to be any different - especially as, like others, its guarantee is 2 yrs.I think something ,must go down the drain as far as software is concerned, meaning that for continuous, I seem to need to get a new drive every couple of years, after discovering that though seeming to be working, in fact, manual synching or back up needs to be done, around that 2 year mark. I've had that with Seagate, I've had that with Western Digital.

4.3.2017

1TB of ruggedness I guess, the drive is surrounded by a rubber sleeve and a protective aluminium shell. Looks smart and comes with two cables a USB-C cable and USB 3.0 cable. It’s early days but so far it’s done everything I’ve asked of it which is mainly acting as a tertiary backup for my photos and music files. I noticed other models come with a plate to put over the USB port but this one doesn’t which is a shame. After running the set up - (I set it up for Windows PC use only as I don't tend to use MACs), if you take into account the LaCie software and a couple of folders it installed - I had 930 gb of space to use so not really 1tb. It comes with option to load additional software e.g.

24.7.2018

There's lots to like about this drive - and a couple of irritating points, enough to drop a star.Firstly, transfer speeds are good. Almost as good as the stated speed, when using USB 3.0. If you look at the photos you will see two screenshots. The slower one (173 MB/s) is when copying from a traditional hard disk drive to this LaCie. The faster speed (320MB/s) is copying from an SSD to this drive. This indicates to me that this drive is very quick at writing and was bottle-necked by the read speed of the source drive in the first speed test. Both tests were for a single 2GB mp4 file, of the type you might upload to YouTube (and hence want to backup).So far so good. The unit is protected by its garish,

27.2.2017

As soon as I plugged this in it worked straight away and the icon came up on my PC as Laci which is the brand of course. The drive itself is made of metal front and back with a orange rubber protection around the edges which means if you accidently drop it its still going to work in most cases especially if it lands on the rubber part.There was a text file which read that I had to run the setup software before I could use the drive which I did and my security software Norton whipped if off thinking it was a virus lol. Anyway I restored this on to my desktop and copied it back to the drive. Unfortunately I couldn't get this setup program to work so I unplugged my other USB drive to save myself

8.3.2017

It's not the prettiest storage device I've ever owned but I suppose rugged > pretty when it comes to storing data. I haven't ever heard of LaCie before which is surprising given that I've since read that it's the film /music/ photography industry's preferred brand when it comes to storing media. I suppose it'll cope well with my hobby photos, music and miscellaneous documents no problem then. I'm terrible at backing up my laptop but I do save my media and important things regularly to external memory but don't really trust one particular device over another though so usually have the same stuff on a few devices just to be sure. I tend to use smaller drives though at around the 16gb - 32gb range so 1TB feels epic.

4.3.2017

Aesthetics, I think this drive is rather ugly looking as a Lacie product I dont think the design is their finest moment having previously owned several well designed and functional Lacie products.Designed as a rugged drive claiming to be able to survive a drop from around 1.2m, being able to survive running over by a 1 tone weight and being rain resistant are claims I dont intend on testing anytime soon.Performance is very good being a USB 3 drive, I own Windows PCs as well as a Macs and swapping and sharing files between both platforms, backing up data are concerns I wanted to address. The generous 1TB capacity should more than sufficient for personal use and I would suggest for small scale business use.Performance and compatibility was excellent,

19.3.2017

Unlike the other reviewers present who seem to have experienced problems with the cable and the robustness of this LaCie product, in this humble abode, this mini hard drive sits quietly at the back of the I Mac beavering away merrily. Frankly. I did not need a portable hard disk to take the beach and get covered in sand. As such this works perfectly well as a static back disc. Indeed, after using it for a couple of weeks linked to Time Machine it is backing up nicely and storing all songs from I-Tunes as a database. Having previous used "My Passport for Mac" this LaCie drive has much bigger storage and was easy to install. Whether it needed to be the colour of tangerine is obviously a matter of personal taste,

13.3.2017

Only downside I can mention is that in many years of using portable drives with my Macs is that size doesn't seem to increasing??Never the less, this is a rugged device and I can vouch for it. Formatted the drive journaled on my MacBook Pro and then added a good few Gb of photos and music to it. It's so far been left in a very hot sunny greenhouse, dropped from a table a couple of times and the drive still works perfectly. The rubber edging has also not damaged if you are to throw this in a large bag the added benefit is that you're not going to damage anything else in the bag from a edge or corner of the drive due to its padding.Perhaps having the cable being able to further protect the drive by having a cable wrap around the outer would be a good design going forward,

30.7.2018

I am not a professional content creator, but I still see a massive advantage working with this external hard drive.+ The exterior is made from a rubbery and durable construction that is still stylish and aesthetically pleasing+ It comes with a multiplicity of connector cables, so you should be able to use it with most phones, laptops and drones+ the screen makes it easy to manage, organise and delete work on the hard drive if necessary and it means that you don't necessarily have to work with a laptop when shooting video+ the storage capacity is 2 terabytes and should cover up to around 60 hours of video and it is a lot that can be stored and managed on the hard drive instead of slowing down

11.4.2017

First of all this drive feels sturdy and well-made. It comes with two leads, one for miniUSB-to-miniUSB, the other is USB3-to-miniUSB.The orange rubbery rim can actually be removed if you prefer to make it more compact, but obviously you lose the protective – and highly visible - element if you do.I didn’t try kicking it around the room or anything but one would hope it’s been thoroughly tested of the sturdiness it claims to have.In terms of use, it won’t let you use or ‘see’ the drive on your computer unless you run the Lacie software, although I was able to uncheck various boxes and skip registration so it wasn’t too painful.Via USB3 it copied over 2.56GB of data from a Windows PC in 78 seconds.I haven’t used it very much yet,

21.4.2019

I purchased this disk as I needed to move 1.4Tb of data from a 2011 iMac to my new iMac for 2019. After trying to use Migration Assistant (even with a Thunderbolt cable) it failed to move all the data and was frustratingly slow. I was able to move my photo and music collection in hours rather than days. I am not keen on the design, the orange bumper is to garish for me, however, the claim is that it does protect the disk and also that it provides a degree of weather proofing. I was impressed with the cables - built in Thunderbolt 1 & 2, with a connection for Thunderbolt 3/USBc and a spare leat for USB 3 as well as the thunderbolt 3 cable.I marked it down for portability as it is quite bulky and heavy.

27.2.2017

I have only had this Lacie hard drive for a few days and so cannot yet comment as to how long it may last, but it appears to be very well made.The drive itself has an aluminium case that is surrounded by a very hard rubber frame protecting the edges that are so vulnerable when dropped.It is a simple plug and play and I was using it within one minute of unpacking it.It is also supplied with 2 cables, hooray!.The only complaint I have is the space on the drive. It is described as a 1 TB drive but after the Lacie software is taken into account you are left with 800 GB of usable capacity. Now 800 GB is more than enough for my purposes but I do think that we need to look at the advertising for these drivesLacie should either make a drive that is 1.2 TB leaving us with the usable space claimed,

31.12.2012

I bought this drive as a replacement for a previous one that failed. After a simple set up to allocate space for different formats (Mac and Windows) the drive formatted itself and was ready to use within 5 minutes. It works perfectly with Time Machine on Mac - note that if you do use this, it is best to have a partition formatted for Mac use only for it to back up to and a separate partition for other files. Another thing to take note of is that when the drive is plugged into the computer for the first time, it says it has 931.5GB of space - when it is formatted, it will clean itself up and give you the full 1TB of space to use. This drive will work with USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 (about 10 times faster transfer speed tan USB 2.0).

LaCie Rugged Secure 2TB - Reviews

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