LaCie Rugged Mini, 5TB, 2.5', Portable External Hard

 

This very slimline mobile drive was easy to set up and use with Imac. Clear instructions and guidelines.

 

I was glad the package included a cable, which surprised me. I have already used it to do a laptop backup and it worked well and reasonably fast. The only shock was self-made because I had not realised, until I read it on the LaCie website, that this drive goes to sleep after a period of non use. I had left it running all night to do a large backup and when I returned to it in the morning and tried to continue, my backup software said “drive does not exist”. I then looked in Windows Explorer and Windows said “there is a problem with this drive” and my heart sank. I did Windows troubleshooting and don’t know what, if anything, it found, but now the drive seems to be working well regardless. I think maybe it had gone to sleep and therefore could not be found. However, it may have had a fault, so I am just warning others of the problem. The other thing to note is that the format on the drive is exFAT so if you are using it for Windows only you might consider reformatting it to NTFS which is a little more stable. But, your choice.

 

Ideal for use as a portable backup disk. It’s not the fastest if writing data directly to disk, but one wouldn’t expect enormous speed of this spec and price and for backup it’s more than good enough. The robust cover is great for travel – especially to counties where hard disks are not allowed in hand luggage; it has a good chance of surviving the hold.
5 stars for support, because, although I haven’t needed any on this particular disc, La Cie support has proven excellent when needed in the past.

 

I had one of the LaCie Rugged Mini a good few years ago and it ran smoothly as it should and it still does, although it has been full for years.

Having been using a different brand in recent times (purely due to availability), I needed two new external hard drives and due to changes that company had made, they failed to do what was actually advertised.

I returned them and replaced them with two LaCie Rugged Minis and they work like a dream!
Easy set up (in under a minute), they are now both running constant live backups on my two computers.

After two weeks of technical issues, it was a joy to finally have something work as it should giving me peace of mind for the safety of my work.

Totally recommend.

 

I’m a student frequently travelling with my MacBook Pro, so thought I ought to start backing up using TimeMachine given that all the work I’ve done the last 5 years is on the one HardDrive. This does exactly what I want- I’ve partitioned it into two different formats- one for Mac (Mac Journaled) for my backups, and another partition in ExFAT for transferring files between Mac and PC. This has worked wonderfully. The first backup of approximately 100GB took only 30 minutes. There is a light that is only visible when illuminated, and flashes to indicate transfers, and slowly flashes to confirm when it’s been ejected successfully.
*NOTE* the USB-C option I went for is NOT the one in the picture, and is in fact the newer model! Much more compact than what I was expecting. The unit is very high quality which inspires confidence in it being my main hard drive. 1TB is enough for me for the next few years. When it fills up, I’ll definitely be rebuying this HD.

 

Neat and compact, quite attractive (especially if you’re an Apple devotee, won’t look out of place with the rest of your gadgets), reasonable speed performance for a spinning disk. Well priced for the capacity, at least in the ‘brand with support’ space – obviously you can get a Chinese no-name device much cheaper.

Plays nicely with Mac straight out of the box, so far a really good device to use with Time Machine. The real test will be longevity, which it’s too early to comment on.

 

As a photographer I do require a reliable portable storage system for my files while out on location, I have used these drives for many years as do all of my colleagues. So far it has performed well and the rubber casing has prevented a good few potential problems. The included support and recovery is also reassuring, I am very happy with this hard disk as its fast, good capacity and supported by the manufacturers well after purchase.

 

I cannot write a review on the product (read on and you will see why), but I believe people need to know some important information.
This product and it’s minimal instructions states it is for PC and Mac – just plug in and start. WRONG.
For Mac you need to reformat.
I am a computer user and not a computer expert. Because I did not reformat (I did not know at the time) I carried on, and eventually after a few hours the drive stopped working and nothing could be done to save it. So I returned it and got my money back. Result – one lost sale of this product.
In this instance the drive was probably perfectly fine.

 

As someone that creates videos for lots of different businesses, I needed a quality hard drive that was reliable enough I didn’t have to worry about the safety of my files. I currently use the 2019 MacBook Pro and therefore was happy to see a hard drive option that was USB C and not standard USB.

Like I mentioned the main feature for me was the fact it had a USB C connection, which this does.

As well as that, I knew I would be traveling around with the hard drive, so seeing it is drop crush and rain resistant is an added benefit. Fortunately, I am yet to have to test out these claims.

Although the orange rubber is quite useful in that it stops the hard drive getting scratched or slipping.

In terms of size, both physically and storage-wise, I would say it is pretty standard and similar to most other products.

Another added benefit that I was pleased with was that it came with a month of Creative Cloud, giving me the opportunity to test out Photoshop and Lightroom.

Overall, I have been quite happy with the hard drive so far and had no issues. It has done what it says and stores my files well. It’s not the fastest of hard drives but it is a HDD and not an SSD, so can’t expect too much. The features I have mentioned make this a great purchase. It is a product that I would recommend.

 

I needed a new temporary storage solution, where I could edit photos and particularly videos, without a hard drive with a spinning disk holding up my workflow so I researched a number of SSDs but the one I chose in the end was the LaCiE Rugged SSD Pro.
Apparently, although it’s not the fastest on the market, it has a longer-term ability to read and write than many if not all of its direct competitors. The LaCie is also rugged enough to chuck in a bag and go and it’s also supposed to be reasonably water resistant. Who could ask for more? I would have given five stars but the price was almost unjustifiable for me. Well done LaCie.

 

This is my 2nd portable hard drive and seems like the best! Working absolutely fine, faster and password protected area is just wonderful. General formatting for Windows took around 7-8 minutes for entire 1TB but password protection encrypted area for 200GB formatting took around 3 hours; however it is one of best function which can be dismounted any time or can be configured to dismount if idle for whatever time you specify though normal area/unprotected area is always connected unless you disconnect it physically.

When you first plug-in it will give you three option to format 1. Windows 2. Mac or 3. Lynux. Only limitation here is it won’t allow you to partition the Hard Drive which is not a big deal as it can be resolved by making several folders however after the formatting is successfully done then it can be password protected for the size you want. In my case I did 200GB. This protected area is 256 bit encrypted which is very good I guess one of the best industry standard ensured security. By the way no one should make the whole of this hard drive password protected because in that case you cannot use or access this drive in every computer because to access this password protected are you need to run pr-eloaded .exe file which cannot be run unless you are administrator or Power user for that computer i.e. in offices computers are restricted so you cannot access restricted area and if the whole external hard drive is password protected than no meaning of portability . The unprotected area can be access anywhere you want as like any other USB Drive. I am using USB 2.00 though it is absolutely faster i.e. selected whole of 18 GB of documents which transferred around 15 minutes in one go and very quiet, no noise at all. Do hope and pray that price of this product would come down and very soon the company would make 5 TB in the same physical size. Hope it would last long. I would highly recommend this product, without any question you can buy it.