LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive 80GB

The LaCie Rugged All-Terrain external hard drive is housed in a very eye-catching, bright-orange rubber bumper that protects the device from shocks. Apart from the colourful bumper and the scratch-protected aluminium shell, the drive boasts a no-frills, straight-to-the-point design. LaCie states the maximum drop height to be 90cm (35in.) while in non-operating mode -- the company recommends not dropping the drive while it's operating. We pushed it off a desk (about 75cm high) a couple of times: it survived the fall and worked just fine, and the rubber bumper prevented the edges from denting, too.

There are two versions of the Rugged All-Terrain drive: USB 2.0-only and triple interface, which includes USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800. All of these interfaces are bus powered, meaning you don't need a separate AC adapter for the drive. If your USB bus doesn't provide enough power, you can attach a second USB cable (provided) to the power port on the drive -- obviously you'll need two free USB ports to do this. We tested the 80GB triple-interface drive using the FireWire connection and the results matched the drive's physical appearance: straightforward and hot.

We were very impressed with the performance of the LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive. It was among the fastest external hard drives we've tested, including products with faster drives and larger caches. Using the FireWire 400 interface, the drive took less than 10.5 minutes to write our 10GB test folder of mixed file types and slightly more than 9 minutes to read back the same folder. In comparison, it wrote the data just a little slower than the LaCie Little Big Disk, which has twice the cache. On the other hand, the Rugged All-Terrain drive is a few seconds faster than the Little Big Disk when reading. The LaCie Rugged All-Terrain drive is the first drive we've tested with the FireWire 800 interface, and the speed improvement over FireWire 400 is significant: 8.6 minutes to write (compared to 10.5 min.) and 7.6 minutes (compared to just over 9 min.) to read our test folder.

You get LaCie's '1-Click' Backup Software with the drive, along with Sliverkeeper for automatic backup and file verification for Mac users. The Rugged All-Terrain hard drive comes with a two-year limited warranty and LaCie provides FAQs, downloads and an information request form on its UK Web site. There's no telephone support, however.

Overall, we were completely happy with the drive's performance and design: it's very fast, quiet and rugged.

Specifications