patrick43 Loc: Los Lunas,NM

My grand daughter is in her first semester of college, majoring in journalism. Next semester she will be taking a photography class. I bought her an iMac air for her graduation. I'm thinking she is probably about ready to back up some material, especially next semester when she'll be taking a lot of pictures. There is an apple store about thirty miles from where I live and they have a LaCie 1TB for about eighty bucks, that is supposed to be designed for Macs. The reviews i've read seem to either be five star or one star with little in between. Seems that it's quiet and doesn't over heat, but the one star people claim it's unreliable. Wondering if any hogs have have used LaCie and have an opinion positive or negative. Thanks in advance. Patrick

Camlane Loc: North Carolina

I use LaCie drives and find them extremely reliable and durable. As the SSD in the Macbook Air is relatively small, she should consider using an external drive for most of her work. I would also consider at least a 3 TB drive. LaCie drives can be purchased from many sources including B&H and Best Buy. It's not necessary to go to an Apple store.

SteveR Loc: Michigan

Is it SSD?

patrick43 Loc: Los Lunas,NM

[quote=Camlane]I use LaCie drives and find them extremely reliable and durable. As the SSD in the Macbook Air is relatively small, she should consider using an external drive for most of her work. I would also consider at least a 3 TB drive. LaCie drives can be purchased from many sources including B&H and Best Buy. It's not necessary to go to an Apple store.[/quote
Thanks so much for the information. I sure appreciate it. Guess I was interested in the apple store, because when I took her there to purchase her iMac, they said if we wanted to purchase a hard drive they could install it and show her the in and outs for free, if she brought her computer in to the store. Of course, she can probably do that on her own.

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

There are only three companies left that make the actual HDD. They are Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. Everything else is repackaged. There are different grades within each brand.

For Apples, it is common to use a "Lightning" connector for external drives that is a little faster than the USB 3.0 that is more universal. If the LaCie has that, it would be a plus.

What ever you get, you should get two and figure out a way for backups.

It may be that the Air has one Lightining port and a couple USB ports. If so, the faster Lightning model could be primary and a slower, maybe cheaper, USB model could be the backup.

patrick43 Loc: Los Lunas,NM

Thanks, I'll check with them about the ports. Apple store recommends this model for the iMac air if that means anything? Says it is time machine compatible? As an aside, we visited your beautiful state two summers ago and loved it. Went through Tacoma on our way back and loved the area as well as Couer d' Lane,Id. If we are fortunate enough to get back that way, definitely plan on spending more time in your area since we've visited the western part. patrick

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

The ratings are because when they work, like any other drive, they are great. But they break. And with that happens, people get angry and write bad reviews.

You can get an $80 consumer drive, like a LaCie, which is marketed at Apple users, or you can get a robust enterprise quality drive like a Seagate Constellation or a WD Re, or a high qualitly drive intended for gaming like a Hitachi or WD Black - these drives all have 5 yr warranties. Then you put it into a fan vented cabinet - heat is the enemy of drives and if the drive runs hot it will fail prematurely. This will cost about $225 altogether for a 3 TB drive. Alternately, you can populate a 2.5" case with an SSD, but that will cost considerably more.

golfeng2

I buy on-line from New Egg. Here is a link to their page with external hard drives.

http://www.newegg.com/Desktop-External-Hard-Drives/SubCategory/ID-414

Does she use Time Machine?
I would partition the drive and use a 200GB partition for time machine and use the remaining as a partition for externally referenced pictures. Or get two drives as stated above.

Then the discussion turns to what software is she using to manage the large number of pictures?

Ron 717 Loc: Pennsylvania

You say that you bought her a "IMac Air" what are you actually referring to, could it be an "IPad Air" not sure what you have.

bhapke

Apple doesn't make an "iMac air" so either it's a Macbook Air laptop, or an iMAC desktop. In either case, you can use any external hard drive. If it comes formatted for Windows you will just need to run "Disk Utility" app to re-partition and reformat.

Apple provides "Time Machine" for automatic backups, and it's not bad. It saves the last several versions of all files, so you can roll back to a previous version if you make a mistake in editing. That doesn't really fit my work, so I don't use it. I recommend using either "Superduper" or "Carbon Copy Cloner" software. Either can make a bootable clone of the internal hard drive on an external hard drive. If the internal hard drive fails, the external will run the computer until you can get the internal drive replaced. This works pretty well as long as she doesn't fill the internal drive. The external needs to be the same size or larger than the internal.

If she gets enough photos that the internal hard drive gets full, she will then need another external hard drive for extra storage. I would suggest looking at a "Drobo" disk array. Drobo has several models that hold multiple hard drives of any mix of capacities. The software on the Drobo automatically provides redundancy when a drive fails. I use a 4-drive Drobo with three drives installed (I will add the fourth when I run out of space). On two different occasions I had one drive fail. A red light next to the drive notified me of the problem. I bought another drive, removed the failed drive and inserted the new drive (without even removing power) and all lights blinked red then green, advising that the unit was OK but there was no redundancy available. After about 1 1/2 days, all data had been moved around in the unit, and all lights went green, letting me know all was OK. All my files were available during the whole process, but I didn't use the unit as an extra safety precaution.

In addition to the Drobo I would suggest a second, off-site backup to be really safe. On-line automatic solutions are best, and there are several good options such as Carbonite, Backblaze, Mozy, Amazon cloud drive, Google drive, etc.

Good luck.

Bryan

JennT Loc: South Central PA

LaCie works hand and hand with mac/Apple computers-- I highly recommend--- strongly urge this thoughtful purchase/gift

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

I've never had a problem with either of my LaCie Rugged drives. I see that they now have a single external rugged RAID drive that allows for data redundancy in a single portable external package.

for example http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Lacie/9000601/

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

For a few months of the year, you have to like gray and wet. We buy Gortex, even in our shooes. I think the phrase, "Raining cats and dogs." may have been invented here.

If you visit again, the very best we have is the 6 or 8 weeks immediately after school starts. It is common to hear "I can believe how nice the weather is!" in October and even early November. The last two weeks of September are always my favorite.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

Just about any external HD will work. Do her iMac have USB3 ports? If so, there are a lot of good deals on externals ranging in size from 1TB to 4TB that are USB3 compatible right now.

Kuzano

LaCie ... BOOO!. Only LaCies I have ever seen are broken ones. They only build the enclosures and their circuitry must be bogus.

They use the same hard drives everyone else uses.. Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba. Those are about the only mfrs left in consumer and commercial drives.

There is something in the wind.. it seems recently that Seagate bought LaCie, probably because LaCie has always been a pretender to a higher level market, hence higher prices.

Seagate has certainly done well with their own name line, FreeAgent.

But, again, LaCie has never actually built hard drives. Every one I have attempted repair on has had standard mfr drives from other manufacturers, and the failure has never been the drive, so far. I have always had to throw the LaCie component away and buy a more reliable External Drive Enclosure.

Western Digital has their MyBook and other drives.

Regarding "built for MAC". A hard drive is a hard drive and they all can be formatted for any platform. The interface may be different, but I just buy Seagates and Western Digitals at the best price, or at a commercial level (black for WD) and format them to the platform (near 30 years in computer consulting, building and teching here).

I don't use the software that comes on any drive to configure it and set up backups. That's always just the software that is programmed by the lowest possible bidder. The operating system you are on and/or third party software will probably work better. I format new drives for the OS they will be used on and dump the software that came with the drive.

Good luck. If you do follow up on LaCie, tell me where you live and I will send you a list of computer techs in your area with good reputations.

:-o

Final Note:

LaCie is always higher priced size for size with the same drive inside than any other drive... Try 30%, the same as Apple MAC products built comparable to same components in a PC. For Apple to PC calculate 30-40% more for comparable and same internal hardware.