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1 for 3 on Porsche designed pieces owned

So I’m looking at my external hard drive this morning and i’m thinking man! i’m glad I don’t own one of the ones that look like Dell designed it or one that is all clunky looking or looks like its Mountain Dew sponsored and has a weird glowing green light (my apologizes if yours has a green light). Also, I wonder if I should be looking into a new external hard drive? i’ve heard mix reviews on these Porsche LaCie drives and I have 2 and i’m looking to get one main one that’s really reliable, any suggestions? Now back to daydreaming about the Porsche Tapiro, also did anyone pick one of these up yet or did we agree that is was too expensive?

24 Comments Leave A Comment

Buddy Overstreet says:

November 3, 2008 at 9:15 am

lacie drives are horrible.
the only drive that seems to consistently win are “G” Drives.

Glenn says:

November 3, 2008 at 9:23 am

Most drive manufacturers seem to go through ups and downs in regards to quality. Lately, the aforementioned “G” drives, as well as Seagate and Maxtor (which is owned by Seagate), have been solid, reliable drives.

David says:

November 3, 2008 at 9:49 am

Lacie drives are horrible as aforementioned and in my opinion, somewhat overpriced. I had a 400gb of theirs that died after a year of use. Learned a big lesson regarding digital asset management after that disaster.

I currently rock a 1tb Western Digital that I only use as a backup for my machines. So far so good.

joshua says:

November 3, 2008 at 10:32 am

I’m not sure what model it is but the external Lacie I have has been reliable for the last 2 years. But you may want to go with the odds here.

Jerry says:

November 3, 2008 at 10:56 am

I’m currently looking into getting a 2TB RAID system from Lacie, simply because it seems to be the most affordable Firewire800 external drive at this level. If you really want reliable, get a RAID system. You can also have a look at the Drobo, which offers an interesting new concept that seems pretty flexible in terms of upgrading. It’s a little more expensive, though.

René says:

November 3, 2008 at 11:04 am

Lacie seems to have some issues, friend of mine whos a pro photographer just had to reformat his Lacie Backup Disk (with Samsng HD) cause of some failures. I own a 1TB WesternDigital Studio which so far has worked quite well, it has FW, USB 2.0 and eSATA. You can also purchase a 2TB Version. Let me remind you that its not the Case what matters, its the Disk inside, and Maxtor/WD never disappointed me yet.

993C4S says:

November 3, 2008 at 11:06 am

Great Porsche post!!!!

I’m a Porsche guy through and through. I ordered my Lacie drive back in March of this year http://993c4s.com/porsche-products/porsche-designed-hard-drive-offers-better-storage-than-your-911/

I have used it daily with absolutely no issues and would recommend it highly.

I was also fortunate enough to have Eton send me their Porsche Designed Raido for a review that you can read if interested at http://993c4s.com/porsche-products/porsche-design-group-porsche-products/porsche-design-p9120-by-eton/

Lastly, as I’m sure you know, the Porsche Tapiro was probably one of the most forward thinking designs that never made it into production. Did you know that the Tapiro was “killed” in a terrorist bombing!! :-)

http://993c4s.com/cars/porsche-prototypes/porsche-tapiro-by-giorgetto-giugiaro/

993C4S says:

November 3, 2008 at 11:14 am

I almost forgot, the Tapiro was not designed by Porsche. It was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro. Giorgetto Giugiaro is an Italian car designer who may be best known for the introduction of the “folded paper” era of car design. The name lends itself to the straight lines and sharp edges made popular on a wide variety of early ‘70s super cars conceptualized and designed by Giurgiaro (Lotus Esprit, De Lorean DMC 12, Maserati Merak, Bora and Quattroporte, BMW M1, etc. etc.)

moni says:

November 3, 2008 at 12:39 pm

Highly recommend the g-technology drives on performance and reliability:
http://g-technology.com/

I’m currently using the g-drive q. A friend uses the g-drive & the mini… very nice drives.

Previously, I had good luck with maxtor drives for about 5 years.

Grant says:

November 3, 2008 at 2:57 pm

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve got 4 Lacie drives in rotation as offsite backup drives and they’ve been working great. But maybe that has something to do with them getting much less use than a drive that’s on and “cooking” all the time.

Jakub says:

November 3, 2008 at 3:08 pm

Not much love for this LaCie drive I see, I have one that i run everyday and has been rockin it for about a year now and the other one just runs Time Machine. I’m going to look into the G drives though but for about 100 USD these LaCie drives aren’t too bad especially when the FW cord gets knocked out and I have no problem reconnecting it back.

Leo says:

November 3, 2008 at 3:38 pm

I’ve had 2 Lacie 500GB D2 external drives that crashed. A quick search online informed me that the 500 variant seems to fail often. I also use a LaCie 250 D2, Maxtor 500, and a WD 250 for daily use. The LaCie 250 has been solid for about 3 years now So, for me its been a little hit and miss from Lacie. But in terms of hard drives, I just can’t afford another “miss”. I’ve been WD all the way ever since.

Happy Hunting!

Sam says:

November 3, 2008 at 8:04 pm

I currently have 6 Porsche drives, one portable firewire Porsche drive and a D2 Lacie drive as well. No problems so far, I use them for backing up photos and music. Essentially each drive has a duplicate so if one dies, there is another copy of the drive. No problems withe drives so far, and some of them are more than four years old. Although, they are not always on.

However, it looks like Lacie has replaced the Porsche design with a less appealing black plastic design.

diskgrunt says:

November 3, 2008 at 8:45 pm

Lacie drives vary on quality mainly because they simply design the cases. The controller chips and drives are 3rd party. That said they normally use good kit, often WD and Maxtor drives but sometimes they cheep out and they use lesser qaulity drives. Unfortunately there’s no way to know what they are using till you get it.

I will add this though, no mater what you buy the average HD lifespan is expected for 3-6 years for consumer grade kit.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/hardware/storage/soa/Tech-Guide-Storage-media-lifespans/0,139023427,120269043,00.htm

So really, HD’s are a gamble to begin with. You’d be better off with NAS raid solution, and LaCie offers those, with a solid backup plan to optical or tape media if you have the options for it. At the very least the raid, if set up right, will give you a safety net if one drive fails, but not if both fail.

SSD media is another option but is pretty expensive still for large data space needs.

Hope that helps.

Sean Harold says:

November 4, 2008 at 12:52 am

I have had good experiences with Lacie except for the porsche model. I think it has to do with the way the power connector attaches to the enclosure.

All I have to say is thank GOD for Time Machine. I recommend a MyBook 1 or 2 TB drive… plus they have firewire 800 instead of usb2.

drew kora says:

November 4, 2008 at 5:19 am

I’ve been happy with my Lacie Drive…I have the Porsche design one pictured above, too. No problems and I have it partitioned with half for Time Machine and half for misc. storage. It’s almost maxed out, though, and a few years old so I’d like to replace it with something new.

G seem to the best for me. At my old job we bought a 1TB G-Raid2 and it was a really nice machine. Stylewise, I still prefer the Lacie Porsche drives. The G mimics the look of a Mac pro, but not as gracefully. Still, it’s at a good price and worked great for me.

alex says:

November 4, 2008 at 5:44 am

Lacie rugged works really well and had a very clean design, supposed to be a designer series.

Ben says:

November 4, 2008 at 8:46 am

I’ve had two of the LaCie D2 drives die on me in the past, which was a real shame because they look great and are extremely flexible in terms of connectivity. I guess I was just unlucky, but my view of the brand has been tainted by this. I guess when you buy a drive that’ll hold valuable data, the number one consideration has to be reliability, and I’m currently shopping around for an alternative. Hadn’t heard of these G-drives until now, not sure if they’re available in the UK but they look really promising.

jetchimp says:

November 4, 2008 at 9:50 am

G-Drives are excellent. Go for a Raid 1 system if you’re serious about your backup as files are saved onto 2 drives at once.

Jason says:

November 5, 2008 at 3:32 pm

im the designer at seagate and altho i didnt work on our retail drives per-se there are some cool new drives for macusers with an icy white glow. check them out (desk to 1.5 TB, portable to .5 TB and FW800 for macs)