LaCie Little Disk 500GB USB 2.0 Review

Watch this item
LaCie Little Disk 500GB USB 2.0
3.2 stars
Average rating for this product is: 3.2 out of 5

From 0 ratings and 5 reviews

Thumb up 60% of users recommend this product

Best Price: £77.4

Rate it Now:

Click on the stars above to rate this product:

Tweet This Item


kbw's Review of LaCie Little Disk 500GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive

27th Apr 2009

Overall Rating

3.5 stars
  • Value for money
    4.5 stars
  • Ease of Set Up
    4.5 stars
  • Time Hard Drive Owned
    Between 1 - 4 Weeks
Good Points

I like the large capacity, small size, and apparent reliability of the drive.


Bad Points

I dislike the scratchy material used for the cover, the silly plastic clip at the rear of the drive, the poor quality extension USB cable, the need for a user-mode driver, the USB cable attached to the drive, and the conspicuous blue LED.

Unfortunately, it's a case of triumph of design over function.


General Comments

As it says on the tin, the LaCie 500 Little Drive is a portable 500G 2.5inch disk. Mine is the USB2.0/FireWire400 version.

The disk is formatted as FAT-32 for Mac/PC compatibility out of the box, but comes with a utility on the disk that reformats the disk to NTFS with 2K sectors. There's an optional TurboUSB executable program that acts as a driver that aims to improve the performance of the drive. I cannot confirm that it improves the performance, but I use it as a matter of course.

The device is covered in black plastic that will look awful when scratched. It's also supplied with a cloth pouch that is of much lower quality that those provided in previous models (as designed by Porsche).

The connectors are odd. First, there's a FireWire400 hub, which is very welcome as I use a Mac Mini that only has one FireWire400 port. But rather than providing a USB port, it has a very short USB cable that I'm sure will break over time. It also comes with a USB extension.

Now, I had no ends of problems with the USB extension cable as the connectors are low quality. The drive continued to disconnect/reconnect, but the problem was solved once I filed the offending extension in the trash. The problem then is the drive is suspended in the air by the very short main cable. However it works well.

Tweet This Review

kbw's review has yet to be rated - Be the first!

How helpful did you find this review?