CNET editors' review
-
CNET editors' rating:
stars
Excellent
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 12/15/2004
- Released on: 09/12/2004
The titanium-hued LaCie Mobile Hard Drive measures a hair more than 5 inches long, 3 inches wide, and a superthin 0.65 inch tall including the feet. The drive's sleek lines are broken only by a power/activity light on the front and USB, FireWire, and AC ports on the black-colored back panel. Our only gripe with the design is minor: the rubber feet should grip better. Weighing just less than seven ounces, the hard drive is a bit too easy to jostle about on the smooth surface of a desk. On the other hand, and far more importantly, the lightweight unit is a joy to carry around, though a protective carrying case would be handy.
Installing the LaCie Mobile Hard Drive is as simple as plugging it in to the USB 1.1 or 2.0 or FireWire bus; no AC adapter is required if your bus provides power, as most do. If the unit doesn't draw sufficient power from the USB cable, you can plug in the included power-sharing cable to a second USB port on your computer to draw power from the USB bus. The 100GB dual-bus unit we tested (the drive is also available in USB- and FireWire-only flavors) mounted quickly on both the Windows XP PC and Mac OS X test beds without the need for additional drivers. The drive also ships with various versions of Silverlining, LaCie's proprietary disk management utility. Both a FireWire and a USB-to-mini-USB cable are included, but the 5V/2.5-amp AC adapter is optional, though it may be necessary for connecting to older computers, and costs $17.
Our anecdotal USB 2.0 file-transfer tests proved that LaCie's unit, with its mobile 2.5-inch hard drive, is speedy indeed--second only to the full-size Maxtor OneTouch II, in our experience. This performance was especially impressive since the 100GB version of the unit spins at only 4,200rpm compared to the Maxtor's 7,200rpm. Of course, this might also be considered pretty good evidence that the USB/FireWire bus and the IDE translation chips are still the biggest bottlenecks in sustained transfer performance for external drives.
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