So, my 120 Gig LaCie Rugged All Terrain Hard Drive arrived today. It was a bit cold off the UPS truck, so I gave it a few minutes to warm to room temperature and then plugged it into my MacBook Pro via the FireWire 800 port with the included cable.
Let me just say first that I think it's awesome that it comes with all the cables included. It has a FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and USB power cable. The last is in case your USB or FireWire port has the amount of juice it puts out throttled and you need an extra zap of power to spin the drive up.
I hooked mine up with the FireWire 800 cable and that apparently had enough juice at the bus. The drive was quickly registered and installed by my MacBook Pro and ready to go without any special formatting, drivers, or jujumagumbo needed.
In an unscientific, non-precision test, I copied a 796.7 megabyte folder of mixed files, timing it with the second hand on my watch. From the time I dropped the folder onto the new disk to the time the copying dialog said it was finished took about 35 seconds, giving it a ~22 megabyte per second write speed. Copying the folder back to my internal hard drive took 23 seconds, giving it a ~34 megabyte per second read speed.
Those read and write speeds are pretty darn sharp. They'll handle most uses (including video editing and viewing) without creating significantly noticeable disk lag over the internal drive. And with 120 gigs of space (111.78 gigs usable), that basically doubles the drive capacity of your average off-the-shelf MacBook Pro.
It's a little pricier than your average USB 2.0 or USB/FireWire combo drive of the same capacity. You're paying for the "ruggedizing", plus the extra circuitry of the triple port design, plus the extra cables. But, there are distinct advantages you buy...
- Because Apple limits the amount of juice at the USB port on the MacBook Pro's USB port (I haven't confirmed this personally so much as read it in review after review of USB 2.0 bus-powered drives), you generally have to sacrifice both USB ports to run a bus-powered external hard drive. As this runs fine off the juice going out of the FireWire 800 port, you get to keep both USB ports open for other devices.
- There is definitely a noticeable speed boost when you hook it up via FireWire 800 instead of the USB 2.0 or FireWire 400 ports.
- Of the FireWire capable devices out there, most are FireWire 400, and few are FireWire 800. Hooking this up via FireWire 800 allows you to keep both USB 2.0 and the FireWire 400 port, which are in greater demand, open and available.
All in all, I'd say keeping the ports free and the speed boost make this worth the premium. How else can you add 120 gigs of high-speed data storage to your MacBook Pro for under $200?
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