Prod Review: Lacie Mobile Harddrive

So as I wrote about in an earlier post, my Sony Vaio crashed last week and so I’ve been backing everything off of it using a Lacie 40 GB Mobile Harddrive. I choose the Lacie drive simply because it had the best price point, and frankly, I’m a sucker for gimmicks (he Lacie drive was designed by F.A. Porsche)

Basically, my plan was to find all of the info on my Vaio and copy it over to the mobile drive. The next step would be to load up the info on my other Windows machine (an old Toshiba running Win2000) and verify that it is ok before shipping the Vaio out for repairs. Sounds easy enough but it wasn’t.

Copying the info from the Vaio was easy and worked well. I used Danitech (which by the way worked without any probs) to boot up the machine and it detected the Lacie drive without any issues, and then copying was not a problem either. Where I ran into problems was trying to copy the info to my Toshiba. I couldn’t get the machine to load up the drive. It would detect that the drive was there, but the driver wouldn’t work correctly. According to the Lacie documentation, the drive should work without problems on Win2000, but this wasn’t so. I tried to manually copy the drivers from the accompanying disk, but it still wouldn’t work. The issue is most likely that the Toshiba is still running ServicePack2 and the documentation does not state that a later ServicePack is needed.

So to get around this, I linked the HD up to my Mac Powerbook G4 (I wasn’t about to start upgrading the Service Packs!). This was a bit easier but still not ideal. The Mac was a little flaky in detecting the Lacie – it would work using Firewire, but not with USB. Now I don’t know if this is a Lacie issue or a Mac issue. Anyway, after having the Lacie detected on the Mac, it was no prob to burn PC specific data to a CD and then open them on the Toshiba.

Overall I like the Lacie drive, but I’m concerned that if it requires a specific version of Win2000, that the mobile capabilities aren’t that great. When I’m travelling and using someone else’s machine (sometimes in a cafe in some random country), I can’t guarantee that all of the Service Packs have been loaded. Once again though, the Mac seemed better for the task.

Now that I’m confident that I’ve got all my info, I’m going to send the Vaio out for the warranty covered repair – I’ll keep you posted on that…

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