ArsGeek

I’ve got to admit, when I think external hard drives it’s hard for me to get very excited. Unless you’re talking huge storage space or minuscule casings then there’s usually not a lot to say except ‘external hard drive’. These devices are becoming more ubiquitous as time goes on as well. They’re getting cheaper and storage is growing. Now that you have media center PC’s finally showing up in living rooms – well, at least a few living rooms, and devices like the Neuros OSD which allow you to record from your TV directly to an external drive, folks might be looking for something that doesn’t look like a giant metal brick or sound like a small Cessna.

LaCie‘s taken an interesting twist and added it to their latest hard drive – they’ve worked with designer Neil Poulton to design something that actually looks nice. Then they’ve added a fan less cooling system so it sounds nice too, assuming nice means quiet.

I took the 500GB model for a test drive over the past few days and I was very impressed. On opening it, I was faced with a shiny black cube that reminded me instantly of the Monolith featured so heavily in 2001 and subsequent sequels.

This thing is black. And shiny. There aren’t a lot of buttons or labels to mar the surface, with the majority of them being at the rear, with the exception of one LaCie label. The rear of the drive features a power in plug, USB plug, power switch and vents for the cooling system. Okay, I was impressed. This is actually a piece of equipment I could see sitting in my TV room. It also looks very nice next to the Alienware m9750 laptop. When turned on there is a pleasant blue LCD reflection beamed to whatever surface it’s sitting on to let you know that the drive is powered on.

I was pleasantly surprised when I plugged the LaCie drive in to my Vista system and it was immediately recognized. Then it proceeded to launch some on board installation software and prompted me to format the drive. I like that it gave me an option to set aside up to 32 GB of FAT32 (the largest technically supported by FAT32) space aside so that I could share data on the drive between my Vista install, Linux and any Macs I happened to have hanging about. Nice touch LaCie.

The formatting went flawlessly and within a minute after plugging the drive in and following the format wizard, I was storing data on it. The drive is cool, quiet and quite nice to look at. My only problem is that I’m rather obsessive about fingerprints. I found myself wiping the drive down after each move (I moved it several times) as my fingerprints were clearly visible. A minor flaw to be certain. The drive is fast, quiet and easy on the eyes.

The drive itself spins at 7200 RPM, has a high speed USB 2.0 connection, 8MB Cache, transfers up to 60MB a second (480Mb). It’ll work with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, OS X (10.3 or higher). Unofficially it also works fine with Ubuntu 7.10.

It’s 4.6 inches by 7.6 inches by 1.8 inches and weighs in at just over two pounds. And it really does look quite nice. I’m glad to see that hardware is being encased in something that I’d be happy to display, rather than hiding behind my existing hardware.

Technorati Tags: lacie, external hard drive, coolest looking drive, monolith, usb 2.0, fanless, cylon

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