LaCie Hard Disk MAX

LaCie designed its Hard Disk MAX drive to provide ‘an enormous amount of storage capacity in a hard disk that's easy for anyone to use'. Has the company succeeded?

In a word, yes. Setting up the drive is simple and straightforward; you need only feed it power, connect it to your machine and then allow the setup wizard to work its magic.

The setup program runs automatically and helps you configure the drive but rather than confuse you with terms like RAID 0 and RAID 1, the app simplifies it. It refers to RAID 0 (striping) as ‘Big' and RAID 1 (mirroring) as ‘Safe'. In the value department, the MAX scores quite well if you consider its cost per gigabyte when running in big mode. With 2Tbytes of capacity and its US $314 asking price, this works out to a fairly cheap $0.15 per gigabyte. This makes it only $0.03 more expensive than an internal Seagate Barracuda 1.5Tbyte hard disk. Great.

Putting the LaCie through our standard benchmark gauntlet we found performance was reasonably quick. It completed our 4.2Gbyte file transfer in two minutes and 52 seconds and copying this same data back to our test PC, the job was done in two minutes and 33 seconds. These benchmark numbers were only slightly slower than those produced by Seagate's FreeAgent Desk 1.5Tbyte drive (also reviewed on ITP.net).

Verdict: An easy-to-use attractively designed storage solution that also does extremely well in the value stakes.