I am looking at getting an external HD... I am leaning towards the 320gig LaCie from B&H HERE They are on sale right now. Have any of you or do you currently use LaCie? I have heard Western Digital and Seagate are good as well.... WD is my next choice, but I would love to save a few $$ if I can with the LaCie. THANKS!

We just bought a LaCie. We have not used it yet, but we will be moving some stuff to it tonight.

It was highly recommended to us.

We love em. I am currently using a 600gb.

Hi Chelsea,
I've been using a portable 100 gig LaCie for about a year and a half now, back and forth to NYC every day in my purse. Knock on wood: nary a problem. It was a bit of a pain to set up on my Mac, but other than day one, it's been fantastic.

At home I have a 500 gig Western Digital. Had that one for about 3 months. So far, no problem except it's not a happy camper if the machine gets turned off before the drive is ejected.

we have a lacie 500gb external. it rocks
do not go with seagate. i had one go on me and we lost 100,000 images. and about 1000 were not backed p

I have a number of LaCie drives and love them all. *touch wood* no problems here.
Initializing them on my Mac was easy and painless. Just use disk utility and you should find it pretty easy.

A little side note: when I first initialized my drives, it recognized it as a LaCie product but the actual drive drive was recognized as a Seagate. Does anyone know if LaCie is just the parent company and if they outsource their drive construction? Maybe just they just build the housings and do the marketing?

Nonetheless, they are good products!

I have a LaCie and have been pretty happy...very simple to use. The only problem I had was with the power cord...the first one went out, but luckily I was still under warranty so they sent me another one for free and it has worked just fine since!

With LaCie, you never really know what you're going to get. I've heard nothing but good things about them. I have one of their CRT monitors and it's fantastic.

They usually use Seagate drives. From my own experience and that of others I've heard of, Seagate drives have the fewest problems -- by far. I've had very bad luck with Maxtor. I know John wrote that one of his Seagates died on him. That's the first I've heard of a Seagate drive wonking out. I still have old SCSI Seagate Barracuda drives that still work fine.

Seagate is also the only company that offers a 5-year warranty on their bare drives. If you get one in an enclosure (like from LaCie or even from Seagate) the warranty is only one year.

With that in mind, I only buy Seagate drives and use separate external enclosures. Doing it this way also allows me to back things up to a hard drive, and then remove it and use the enclosure for another drive. If you get a drive already in an enclosure, you'll void the warranty if you remove the drive.

Other World Computing is a fantastic company to work with and they have some of the best enclosures you can get. They cater to Macs but their enclosures can work with any system. They'll even put a kit together for you and warranty it. And if you use a Seagate drive, once their 1-year warranty runs out, you still have another 4 years on the drive from Seagate.

That's what I'd recommend.

Smartdisk Firelite

http://www.smartdisk.com/eWeb/smartdiskus/...liteporthdd.asp

1 terabyte Lacie here. No problems after one year. Travels between my lappy and my PC (until I get my workflow completely on the mac -- requires cs3). Hassle is that you need to have PC software that can read mac drives (nothing to do with drive quality - just FYI if you are moving data between mac and pc -- you can browse network drives and network copy but that is slower than connecting the drive directly -- esp with 800mb firewire)

Share the love,
Mike

i've had two of the porsche designed drives for 3+ years, and they run fine, however i've moved to WD drives because i've found they tend to dissepate heat better (and heat is major enemy of hard drives).

also just a small correction on a post above...segate is not the only manufacturer with 5 year warranties on bare drives - both WD and Maxtor also have 5 year warranties.

-dave

I've used both LaCie and WD externals with good success. Yes, I've had a Porsche drive crap out on me, but it wouldn't stop me from going back to get another. Hard drives come and go.....no matter the manufacturer.

i do. love them. i get them at buy.com. sign up for their emails and get great deal announcements.

All of my LaCie drives have been very reliable. There was a period when I thought I may have fried my HD, but it turned out to just be the power supply. The power supply was still useable, I just had to use it on a drive other than the HD.

I have had one of everything! (or so it seems...so much for brand loyalty, eh?)

Maxtor blows! Lost one of those drives...~ 6 weeks out of warranty.

Western Digital -- no problems

SeaGate -- I bought an internal and put it in one of those $40 external cases. The drive is inconsistent...but I don't know if it's due to the power supply on the external case or not. I had all of the data backed up so I disconnected it and haven't really been motivated to hook it up in another box to see if the problem is the drive itself. I'm taking comfort (and procrastinating) in the 5 year warranty on this drive.

Lacie -- just got a 500 gb porsche design about 2 months ago. It's fast compared to my other external drives. Minor complaint -- it's louder.

From what I've seen drives warranties vary even within manufacturer. I've seen some 1, 3 and 5 year warranties from different manufacturers...it's as if the warranty period is derived from the drive cost (i.e. cheaper drives, less warranty).

I'd be surprised to see a Maxtor drive with more than a 1 year warranty -- I wouldn't store table shots or my favorite virus infected files on a Maxtor drive!!