Lacie Porsche Design Desktop Drive

No complaints! – Great desktop drive. I find it fast and super reliable. I work with very large files and this drive has never shown any form of struggle when accessing or saving files. As a graphic designer I can't live without this product.

No super-car performance for this Porsche! – If you think "Porsche Design" means this disk drive will be blazingly fast, you may be sadly disappointed. I bought the 8TB version to replace my 3-year-old 4TB Seagate Backup Plus external hard drive. Both drives are very similar in design, having a large form factor and requiring a 240-volt power adaptor, so they are regarded as "desktop" drives rather than being "portable".

LaCie is actually owned by Seagate, and the only real cosmetic difference between the two drives is that the Seagate is encased in black plastic, whereas the LaCie is decorated with some silver aluminium, giving it the outward appearance of a higher quality product. But it turned out to be a sheep in wolfs clothing, as I was very disappointed to find that the LaCie drive has a MUCH slower spin-up time than the Seagate.

"Spin-up time" is the time it takes for a hard disk to accelerate its platters from a stopped state (zero RPM) to its operational speed (5400 RPM in the case of most external drives). Windows (and presumably Mac too) stops a drive while it doesn't need to be accessed, to conserve energy and battery life, and to reduce noise. Stopping the drive while it isn't required also presumably increases its life, due to less heat, and less wear on the spindle bearings

Whenever the computer requires access to a stopped drive, you may notice a delay while the drive is spun up, because the data you need is inaccessible until it reaches 5400 RPM. During this brief time of inaccessibility, your mouse will still work, as will many normal functions, but your computer may appear frozen in some respects, eg. there will be a delay opening documents or saving files during this time; and there may be a delay opening programs/apps, such as your web browser or word processor; or even just opening your Documents folder.

Your computer's built-in hard drive spins up very quickly, so fast you wouldn't even even notice. But external drives tend to be slower - the Seagate drive had a spin-up time of around 5 or 6 seconds, which is slightly annoying, but in the time it takes to count to five, you're back in business. I naively assumed that the LaCie (being a very similar product from the same manufacturer) would have similar characteristics to the Seagate...

But it doesn't - the LaCie takes at least 15 seconds (sometimes longer) to spin-up! I've timed between 15 and 22 seconds, and this happens many times throughout the working day.

I opened a support case with Seagate/LaCie to find out if the brand new LaCie drive is really meant to be 3 to 4 times slower at spin-up than the 3-year-old Seagate. The short answer appears to be Maybe.

The "long" answer is... well, this is the next part of the problem when you buy a Seagate or a LaCie product...

You see, with LaCie/Seagate it appears to me that you deal with one person throughout the life of a support issue. Now you may think that sounds like a plus. But when that person's grasp of the situation is less than stellar - so you keep having to restate the issue and ask simple questions over and over because they're just not read or understood properly - and when some replies to you can take MORE THAN 2 WEEKS to arrive, well, one's patience starts to wear rather thin - a simple support case can drag on for weeks!

As I write this review, my support case is still open after a month, having still not received the data I requested on comparative spin-up time for both drives. When they do reply, time is often wasted, because, eg. they've sent data for the wrong drive, and the data sheet they did send didn't contain spin-up times anyway. So I have had to re-state the request several times, and so far have not received a satisfactory response, other than "We would like to inform you that spin time up to 20 second is based on the hard drive specification and also depend on the operating system version" which is less than satisfactory or encouraging.

Moreover, each and every reply starts with the same aspirational platitude "My name is [name redacted for privacy] and my goal is to make you a very satisfied customer today by finding a resolution for you. I truly apologize for the issue you are experiencing with your hard drive. I am happy to assist you in resolving your situation." which just makes a mockery of the standard of technical support you actually receive. I am given to wonder if perhaps there is actually only one person dealing with all their support requests?

CONCLUSION This may well be a good drive for purely backup purposes, where you don't need to keep it connected to your computer at all times; or perhaps as a media server for videos. But its laggy performance issue renders it painful to use as a permanently-connected drive. It's also significantly noisier than the older Seagate, not that this would be of great concern to most users.

Good looking but low reliability – Bought one of this a year ago. Works very well in first year. It then started behaving unreliable. 5 out of 10 my Mac could not detect the drive. I tried to contact their technical support, however, Lacie has been merged with Seagate and the tech support site went to nowhere. Fortunately, their customer support was responsive and provided me the tech support contact in Australia.

One of the reasons I bought this was the stylish look that attracted me. I was disappointed straight after took it out from the box. The ugly cables let down the overall look.

There is a loud sound when it starts up. However, it doesn't bother me.

Review of the large external HDDs. All of these drives have been tested – I tested the drives that I have bought & cannot fault them. The Seagate is as a large external HDD should be - plug & play out of the box. Both brands are fast at Read & Write & I will buy either one again. The LaCie Porsche is enclosed in a suburb sturdy case with a large amount of brushed aluminium & if you are going for 'looks' this is the one to buy. It is slightly cheaper as well. See review above. Actually I cannot fault either brand and will buy again either one depending on bargains at the time.

OK – Because this power adapter failed, I lost all data on this HD, but fortunately most was backed up. I am not entirely happy with LaCie at this point in time, as it hasn't been as reliable as I would have liked. Compact size. Great for minimum space issues. I have two (2) of these units. The power adapter. I had to purchase a new one as the original failed on what appears to be thermal overload, and the computer would lock up. Had to force shutdown and switch off the power to this adapter, then re-boot. After the adapter cooled down, I could then re-boot this external HD, till it went out on thermal overload again.