Review: Lacie Pocket 500gb External Drive

A few days ago, I bought 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 in any pocket in my bag (3.19 x 0.71 x 5.08 inches [WxHxD]) and, with a weight of 3 pounds, it’s easy to take everywhere. I know that having an external notebook hard drive isn’t the safest way to store your precious data, but it’s a great place to store music, videos, and photos that you can take anywhere. At home, I have my HTPC (Home Theater PC) with a lot of free storage, so what I do is 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 of having another copy in the cloud with Amazon S3). Everything is backed up using a simple bash script I made that copies to the external drive and to my media center via FTP.

The Lacie Pocket drive comes with just a USB 2.0 cable (no FireWire—no problem, new MacBooks don’t have them anyway) and uses it to power the HD and transfer data. That was one of the things I was looking for when buying it: an external drive that doesn’t require a separate power supply. 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 happens when you try connecting a device that requires more energy to a USB hub.

As I am planning to use it on Linux/Windows/Macs, I formatted it as FAT32, even knowing it only accepts files smaller than 2^32-1 bytes (which is inconvenient when downloading huge high-def movies). The drive is a 5400RPM 2.5-inch, so you shouldn’t expect it to be super fast, but the speed is decent and works for me.

Here you can check out some more pictures of this gadget. Enjoy!