Expand your digital life by storing much more photos, videos, music and files on the LaCie mini Hard Drive & HUB, specially designed to fit perfectly with the Apple Mac mini. Now you can connect all of your hardware peripherals at once - like your iSight, mouse, keyboard, web cam, camera, video recorder, speakers and other USB hard drives. Easily back up your computer or upgrade storage capacity, whether on a Mac mini, or another desktop or laptop computer. This multiple-connection companion is plug & play, cross-platform and ultra-quiet. Its sturdy metal casing provides advanced heat dissipation and its unique four-corner crown is designed to provide cooling airflow between stacked drives to protect against overheating. 4 corners prevent overheating by allowing airflow between stacked units Plug & Play design Driver-free installation for Mac OSX and Windows 2000/XP 7200RPM Rotational speed Maximum Data Transfer Rates - Up to 34MB/sec with USB 2.0; Up to 40MB/sec with FireWire 8MB cache Approximate Unit Dimensions - 6.5 x 6.5 x 1.77; Unit Weight - 3.2 lbs. 1 year limited manufacturers warranty

REVIEWS:
1) Seems to work fine but too loud: I just received the drive and connected it to my mini mac. I love the mini mac because it does everything my family needs and it is very silent, which is nice because it is placed in our living room.
The mini mac only lacks disk space and hence I bought this drive that adds a few hubs free of charge.

The drive seems to work well and new stuff on leopard like time machine seems to work nicely and I copied all files I had on different drives to this one (Nice to have 500GB... no need to sort stuff out)

The thing I don"t like about this drive from the moment I started it up is that this thing sounds like an airplane during a through-start on Katmandu airport... So I"ll have to ban it from my living room. I"ll keep it as a back-up drive far away and well isolated from our living room.
2) Was quiet, not now: I"ve had a LaCie Mini 500 GB unit for about 3 months and it"s been great. It"s quiet. Unfortunately, yesterday it suddenly became very noisy. I"m not sure if its the fan or the drive, but it"s unbearable at this point - there"s a very loud whirring noise, high pitched.

So the mixed reviews regarding noise are probably all correct. It can be quiet and it can be very noisy. AND it can go from one state to the other. I"ve turned it off for the day - I hope a little rest will improve the noise!

Well, after leaving the unit off all morning, I"ve rebooted the Mac Mini off the LaCie Mini and the noise is gone. It"s whisper quiet again. When the noise occurred, I had been doing multiple backups from other Macs in the house to other attached drives on the Mac Mini. Since I boot off the LaCie Mini, there was a lot of disk activity there, probably a result of queuing data or such. At any rate, the drive activity may have heated the Mac Mini and the LaCie Mini to the point where noise started.
3) Fast but noisy: Just like everybody else said, it"s noisy. The fan on mine runs regardless of how hot the device becomes, and periodically (after running for several hours) starts speeding up and slowing down, creating an intermittent growling sound not unlike a constipated bear.

A fine product if you can deal with the stupid fan.


4) Much quieter and better than past reviews would indicate: With great hesitation, I ordered this 500 MB External Hard Disk. I worried its noise would be as unbearable as others had indicated. It is with great relief I can report the noise of Lacie"s 500 GB drive is only slightly more than my wife"s Lacie Mini 250 GB drive. I use the 500 GB drive along side my very quiet MacBook Pro laptop and with Leopard"s (Mac OS X 10.5) TimeMachine backup software. Lacie"s drive is periodically woken (about every hour) from it"s sleep by Time Machine to create a backup snapshot of the laptop"s internal drive. Waking from its completely silent sleep, the Lacie can be heard, but it is the whir of the 500 GB drive and a fairly quiet fan, which can vary depending upon the amount of data to be written, the length of time it takes, and (surprisingly) the room"s temperature. While louder than the very quiet MacBook Pro laptop, the drive"s noise is not objectionable to me, but it does vary.

Pros:
- Intelligent way drive wakes from silent sleep & returns to sleep when done
- Works well with Apple"s TimeMachine backup software
- 2 Firewire & 3 USB 2.0 ports excellent addition to computer that needs more (Mac Mini & laptops)
- Good price for 500 GB drive
- Very fast drive (quicker than my laptop"s Internal Hard Drive)
- Built like a tank, but looks nice, even without complementary looking Mac Mini

Cons:
- Not absolutely quiet; fan-less drives quieter
- Has a fan
- Not cheapest 500 GB drive
- Takes a bit more desk space than a "vertical" drive

I recommend this drive to anyone who needs extra Firewire &/or USB 2.0 ports, and it"s also a perfect, complementary design for Mac Mini owners. There are quieter, cheaper, and larger drives, but none that have everything this drive has.
5) Fan Noise Unacceptable: I am not a LaCie basher; I"ve owned 20-30 LaCie External drives going back to the days of SCSI. I own about a dozen right now. I have never had an HD failure with a LaCie drive. The one time I returned a drive to LaCie, they could not duplicate the problem, but still took the time to call me and discuss in detail other-equipment problems that might be causing the drive to disappear from the LAN.

Be that as it may, I am spending my Sunday transferring almost 300GB of audio/video files to the replacement 500 GB drive I received from Amazon.

The problem? Two words: fan noise. I own an identical LaCie 500 GB drive/hub along with LaCie 80 GB and LaCie 250 GB drives in the Mini configuration. They are virtually silent. This most recent (first use: two weeks ago) addition is so loud that you can sometimes hear it in the next room or from 20-30 feet away. In fact, it just started whining as I wrote the last sentence, so I can look forward to about four more hours of noise (the replacement is still silent, but this large data transfer should let me know quickly if it has a similar problem).

This is the sort of quality-control problem that needs to be worked out between LaCie and its vendors; I"m just glad I was able to swap the drive under Amazon"s 30-Day defective-replacement policy.

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