A few weeks ago now I received my LaCie 500GB D2 Quadra external Hard Drive. I had been looking at many external hard drives for some time as I wasn’t ready to spend my money on extra storage that quickly. I had some criteria of what I wanted from a drive, it needed to be reasonably quiet, be atleast 500GB, in the best case have Firewire800, be reasonably priced and most important of all be reliable. This led me to look at firstly the Western digital Studio drive with FW800. I mostly liked the look of it though it did look a bit chunky, its well priced and has fw800 but I started reading lots of reviews of it dyeing on people after a short period of time, so I was slightly put off. I ended up checking out the Seagate freeAgent drive too as it was alot cheaper than the FW800 drives by quite alot and although I wasn’t keen on the looks at first it quickly grew on me but then I read some customer reviews and it seemed the drive had a design flaw when it came to heat dissipation and would die quite easily so this lead me to the new LaCie Drive. 500GB, FW800, Great looks, new heat sink design to dissipate heat, and a favorite amongst Mac Fans Worldwide. Unfortunately it wasn’t available on Dabs.com when they were offering free shipping but I thought it’s a reasonable price £116.90 ( about £17 more than the Western Digital drive) so I might aswell order it I won’t have to wait too long. Fortunately it’s stock was received early so I got the drive within a few days.

Upon receiving the drive I was shocked at the huge box dabs thought to package it in, I thought we were ment to be saving the planet now? The actual Box for the drive was very smart looking with plenty of pictures of the drive and would surely appeal to someone buying this drive from a retail store especially somewhere like an apple store. Once out of the box the stand required attaching with the provided allen key as LaCie allow the drive to be put into a custom rack they sell so the stand may not be needed. The Drive appears a darker shade of grey than pictures would have you believe and they also show the same colour all over the drive but in fact the front face plate and stand are a different metal and are a darker grey, as seen in the picture below.

The Drive is quite large in my opinion but I think thats to do with the orientation of the drive. Compared to my External usb2 toshiba 320GB drive it looks big but I think thats because the drive is taller rather than longer and the internal drive is probably mounted vertically to allow all the input circuitry to sit at the rear of the drive where as the toshiba is mounted horizontally. I wouldn’t say it was too big though so it’s not a problem.
I was happy to see all the cables included with the driving including FW800 and ESTA though I was aware they would be included. The FW800 cable is quite short though so I will be doing some moving around to get the drive sitting somewhere neater on my desk. Once up and running the drive is noticeably louder than my toshiba drive with a little bit of vibration noticeable as when I lean on the desk it changes the sound the drive makes. I wouldn’t say it was actually that loud however, infact I’ve just started the drive up now to be sure of what it sounds like and it’s very very quiet, all I can hear is a slight swirling noise, the only time when the drive is more noticeably louder is when your writing files to it. You could certainly leave the drive running while your working on a quiet mac and not hear it at all with some quiet music playing. However the drive has an auto switch off mode that if un-accessed will go to sleep after about ten minutes ( though not if you use E-SATA)

There’s two main features of this drive though that make it worth every penny. The first feature is the Quad inputs on the back including USB 2.0 , Firewire 400 and 800 and E-SATA. The second main feature is tied in to this and it’s the speed of the drive! I’ve only been using the drive with Firewire 800 but it’s fast! Very fast! Copying large files to a USB2 drive can take a long time, but over FW800 it takes literally seconds, and doing some xbench drive tests I found the drive to score better than my internal drives. Ok so I know it’s not really is as fast as the internal drive but it’s not far off.

The blue light on the front of the drive is also a button and can be assigned as a shortcut for functions on your Mac or PC but I haven’t yet found this useful, though it’s nice if you used a backup app with the drive every time you switched it on. As I’ve said I’ve only had the drive for a few weeks but Im hoping it’s a very reliable drive as the heat dissipating design should allow the drive to remain cooler when in heavy use.

Overall I’m very impressed with the drive it’s reasonably quiet, very quick and has a great range of inputs. It also looks very stylish and would look great next to a mac pro or iMac on your desktop. I’d rate the drive 9 out of 10 with the only improvements I’d suggest being a slight reduction in size, the drive being a bit quieter while being accessed and a longer FW800 cable being provided.