Review: Lacie Pocket 500gb External Drive

Some days ago I bough the Lacie Pocket 500gb external hard-drive, and since then I have been very happy with my purchase. The HD is small enough to fit any pocket in my bag (3.19 x 0.71 x 5.08 inches [WxHxD]) and with the weight of 3 pounds, it makes easy to take everywhere. I know that having an external notebook hard-drive isn’t the safest way to store you precious data, but its a great place to store music, videos and photos in which you can take anywhere. At home I have my HTPC (Home theater PC) with a lot of free storage, so what I do is, I have a backup of all my data on the external lacie drive, and another copy of my precious things on my HTPC, this way I hope all my information is safe (I am also thinking on having another copy on the clouds [amazon s3]). Everything is backed up using a simple bash script made by me that will make copies to the external drive and to my media center via FTP.

Lacia Pocket drive comes just with a USB 2.0 cable (no firewire [no problem, new macbooks dont have them anyway]), and uses it to power the HD and to transfer data. That was one of the things I was looking for when buying it, some external drive that you don’t need to go everywhere with a power supply just for the device. If your USB port doesn’t have enough juice to power the hd, you can use another port just to power it. This problem usually happen when you try connecting some device that requires more energy to a USB hub.

As I am planing to use it on Linux/Windows/Macs, I formatted it it as FAT32, even knowing it only accept files smaller then 2^32-1 bytes (what sucks when downloading huge High-Def movies). The drive is a 5400RPM 2.5-inch, so you shouldn’t expect it to be really super fast, but the speed is decent and works for me.

Here you can check some more pictures of this gadget, enjoy.