Product Reviews

This latest Rugged portable drive from LaCie packs a whopping 500GB of space, a big step up from the previous limit of 320GB. Better still, this triple-interface unit, which boasts FireWire 400 and 800, and USB 2, costs only £50 more than the bog-standard USB 2-only version. Cables are supplied for all three connections, along with a USB 2 power cable for computers that limit bus power.

Inside is a triple-platter disk that raises the weight to 298g, 48g heavier than lower-capacity models. Proportionally, this sounds significant, but being on par with a measly 16 teabags or a bag and a half of crisps, it's negligible in practice.

Plug in the drive and LaCie's Setup Assistant appears in the Finder. This can partition the whole drive for use with a Mac or to set aside up to 32GB as Fat32 to share with Windows PCs. Manuals and software are

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also copied to the new partition, which is great for MacBook Air users without an optical drive, although a CD is included, too.

After that, there's no going back: the assistant is a run-once utility, even if you back it up. It's of little consequence for most users, but those wanting to split up the disk and create a bootable partition for emergencies will need Apple's Disk Utility. LaCie's tool is for the simplest scenarios - particularly now Macs can natively run Windows - and it does the job well enough.

LaCie claims sustained data transfer of 57Mbits/sec over FireWire 800, 40Mbits/sec over FireWire 400 and 36Mbits/sec over USB 2. It lived up to this over FireWire 800, but performance over the other two wasn't quite up to the quoted speeds.

It's more convenient than its cousin, the Little Big Disk Quadra, for carrying large amounts of data on a daily basis. It's leaner and lighter, which works in its favour, but it lacks that drive's Raid for data integrity and its speedier disk for video applications. However, it's still well equipped, with the ability to daisychain over FireWire - handy if the two ports on a MacBook Pro are taken up by the drive and a video camera.

It may look pricey but it's roughly on par - in pounds per gigabyte - with the 250GB and 320GB versions. If their portability appeals but capacity is a sticking point, this version won't disappoint, especially when connected using FireWire 800.