Lovin' Our LaCie External Drive: You get what you pay for

Over the years I have put together quite a few external hard drives, typically buying a bare enclosure to put around a "spare" desktop or laptop drive that had been replaced by something larger or faster. The primary use for such drives was backup storage, like a quick backup of my laptop before heading out on a trip, or archives of image libraries and business files. These are files that do not need to be clogging up my work drive, but still need to be available quite quickly from time to time.

On the whole, the external drives that I 'built' did a decent job, but they tended to be a bit noisy. Lately a new storage need emerged on our home/office network: access to large image collections, video, and music libraries. My wife's photo art was the prime mover. She's an Apple user and bought a LaCie brand external drive from the Apple Store.

I have to say at first I was a little ticked. These are not the cheapest drives and Apple Stores are not noted for their low prices. But after using it for a couple of moneys I am impressed. It is quiet. It is fast. It wakes up and goes to sleep appropriately and does not seem to skip a beat (in fact, after some reconfigurations of our home/office network we are now using it for the 80+ gigabytes of iTunes content we have accumulated.). While LaCie drives always seem to price out slightly more expensive than the competition, this could be a genuine case of "They're worth it."

Recently I noticed some decent prices on Amazon.