darryl ramm’s blog

In swapping around PCs and laptops recently I needed a backup solution. I ended up with a LaCie 500GB Brick drive and like it so much I’ll write about it (and pimp it for Amazon). LaCie has a whole series of these brick drives designed by French designer Ora-Ïto. They are not only cute but also practical.

As well as backups I needed a way to move hundreds of gigabytes around, for things like syncing a large iTunes library between PCs at different locations. Far too much data and updated too much to want to use DVD+RW/-RW drives. An external USB drive was clearly the way to go.

So I went looking at drives at local retailers. While there was quite a selection available I managed to find fault with many of the drives, including -

• Suspect looking construction quality
• Vertical standing drives that I was worried would fall over
• Light weight drives and/or poor feet that could easily slide off the desk

So that frustration lead to more looking. The market is basically divided into smaller very portable drives and larger desktop drives.

• Portable USB drives
  • Mostly intended to be powered from USB hubs
  • Maximum capacities typically in the 100GB range, with some larger
  • Typically 5400 rpm drives

• Desktop USB Drives
  • Powered by an AC adapter
  • Typically 7200 rpm drives
  • Often have larger caches than the portable drives
  • Maximum capacity around 0.5TB for a single drive
  • Some higher-end units have two drives and most of those can do mirroring

My problem was I would eventually like one of each type of drive. A desktop drive for large fast backups and a small portable drive for digital photography when travelling with my laptop (the 50GB drive on my ThinkPad T42 is jammed full and theT42’s have issues with upgrading to a larger internal hard drives).

The LaCie 500 GB Brick USB 2.0 hard drive is a desktop unit, and is 4.4 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches. The drive has soft anti-skid feet, are heavier than other drives so they are unlikely to accidentally slip off the desk. As they lay flat on the desk there is no way they can fall over. The design means you can stack a few drives together. The external power supply is corded, not a wall wart, so there are less hassles finding a power outlet with space. The power cables are nice and long. After testing the drive by copying a few hundred gigabyte to it I reformatted the FAT32 filesystem to NTFS and the drive is working great.

For me an added bonus is that LaCie make portable versions of these brick drives. Those portable drives are smaller, but still stack on top of other brick drives, they have four “Leggo” nubs instead of the six nubs on the desktop brick drives. The heavy desktop brick will stop the portable brick sliding around.

The USB-A to USB-B cable supplied with the drive is only 2 feet long, too short for many applications. You may need a longer cable, something like a Belkin 6 foot USB cable.

One thing missing from these drives and almost all others external (desktop) drives is a powered USB hub. If the drives had an built in USB hub it be easy to daisy chain multiple drives together. You’ll only have the performance of a single USB connection to the computer, but for many uses that would be fine. Both LaCie and Iomega have external USB drives targeted at the Mac Mini that have built in USB hubs, I’m not sure about others.