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Overall Rating

pretty quiet. fast FW800. mostly problem free
Rated 5 stars.

Overall Rating

What Annoying Light? This Product Works Great
Before making any purchase of over $100, I always start out by researching the various products available which meet my needs and are in my price range. I thoroughly researched external drives by reading consumer reports reviews, other reviews, and customer ratings from people who purchased the device.

I am an average computer user, with files I do not want to be without in case of drive failure. I use Mac OS Leopard, and wanted to install Snow Leopard. I have heard some horror stories about that upgrade, so I wanted to have an easy way to revert back to Leopard if things were not to my liking. I have an Intel iMac with a 320GB internal drive, and I wanted a drive that would let me use Time Machine for backups, offline storage of media files, and to hold a bootable clone of my system (the clone is what I wanted in case Snow Leopard caused me grief). I have been able to do all three tasks with this drive effortlessly. Important note: most experts recommend having your bootable clone image on a separate hard drive, and not on the drive you use for backups so as to not have a single point of failure. I decided this was an acceptable risk, since I can always boot from the Leopard install DVD if things really go awry. I might eventually buy another, smaller drive (around 350-400GB) just for the bootable clone, but for now this works just fine for me.

After reading the reviews here on Amazon and on other sites, I was impressed by the storage per dollar value this product has. Also, I have read scores of reports which rank Seagate drives much higher than LaCie drives as far as reliability and long life. The only hesitation I had before buying this product were all of the reviews clamoring about how bright and annoying the light is on this product. From all of the laments on this subject, it gave me serious pause as my computer desk is in my bedroom and I didn’t want to have to deal with a floodlight while trying to get to sleep. The overall stability, reliability, and high reviews made me bite the bullet and order it. If it were really as bright as claimed, I could always buy some nighttime sunglasses.

Well, guess what? I’m delighted to report that the light is not a problem at all for me. Honestly, I have to wonder if the people who made such a fuss about this might have abnormally dilated pupils! I have my drive on a windowsill behind my iMac and I cannot tell whether the drive is on or off from my bed, I really can’t. Here I was thinking I was going to have the blinding flash from Indiana Jones’ Ark of the Covenant, when the reality is that I have a nightlight at best.

The drive is as effortless to install as others have claimed: you plug it in, you connect the firewire cable and that is the extent of it. Period. Your Mac finds the drive immediately, and Time Machine is ready to write to it immediately. As stated above, I wanted the drive to do three different things (clone image, Time Machine backups, and some external storage for movies), so I used Disk Utility to create three partitions. This took all of five minutes and then I was off and running. I used the program “Super Duper” to create my clone (that’s a third party program) and it worked just fine. The first backups and clone took several hours (as you would expect), but the rest of my Time Machine backups are taking an average of 10-15 minutes each.

The drive is quiet (I think there is a click when it starts, and then a click when it stops, but that’s it, and that is certainly reasonable). The lack of a fan is what makes it so quiet, and even without that noisemaker, it doesn’t get overly hot. The data transfer speed is incredible, as my Mac negotiated the FireWire 800 connection–the unit’s fastest speed. I tested booting from my clone image I made on this drive, and was able to do so without any noticeable slowness (I didn’t try opening large files in PhotoShop or the like, so you might have slowness if you do that. That isn’t a concern of mine as I just needed a reliable way of ensuring I could still use my iMac if the internal drive ever fails). The documentation is very scant as others have noted, but I honestly have not needed any (besides, their web site has a decent FAQ and user support section). Having the cables included in the box was an extra bonus.

I am very glad I bought this drive. It does what I need without requiring me to handhold it, or tweak it, or consult manuals. If I encounter any problems with this unit, I will update these comments. But quite honestly, after buying this drive I couldn’t be happier.