LaCie Little Disk

LaCie is a company that clearly places plenty of stock in the design of its products. The big brother of this smaller drive is designed by Neil Poulton, and this one has been crafted by Sam Hecht, both of whom – so we are led to believe – are big names in the world of product design.

For all the name dropping, though, the Little Disk is still an angular black rectangle minus the ethereal blue access light of its sibling. Its glossy black finish may look smart, but it’s a terrible fingerprint magnet, and neither do we like the detachable cap, which will go missing in no time at all.

In its favour, the Little Disk is very small and light at 186g – it’s beaten on this front by only the Freecom Mobile Drive XXS and two others. And under the lid is a more sensible extendable USB cable and 5V DC input.

The uniform shape of the Little Disk also means that it can be stashed away neatly and stacked with other devices – which can’t be said of the curved Iomega eGo.

Performance, however, was inconsistent. While the Little Disk handled our single 50MB file in a respectable time – it completed read and write testing in 1.5 seconds and 1.9 seconds respectively – the Little Disk seriously slowed when handling our multiple-files benchmark: we had to wait 52.7 seconds for our 100MB collection of files to finish writing to it.

Apart from all its other shortcomings, it’s also let down by price. The price is mid-range for the portable drives we’ve looked at this month, but 61c per gigabyte, combined with the so-so performance, means that this drive doesn’t represent value for money.

• 
  Verbatim External Hard Disk
• - Recommended -
  Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus
• 
  Buffalo Drive Station Combo 4
• 
  Buffalo Ministation Pro
• 
  Freecom Mobile Drive XXS
• 
  Freecom Toughdrive
• 
  Iomega eGo
• 
  Seagate FreeAgent Go
• 
  Transcend StoreJet Portable
• - Recommended -
  Western Digital My Passport Elite
• 
  Iomega Prestige Desktop Hard Drive
• 
  LaCie Hard Disk
• 
  Seagate FreeAgent XTreme
• - Labs Winner -
  Western Digital My Book Home Edition