LaCie Brick 500GB

Everyone has fond memories of Lego, and the LaCie Bricks garnered more than a few inquisitive glances from everyone in PC Authority’s offices. In practice, of course, practically all external hard disks are stackable, so consider the knobs on top of the Brick more eye-candy than a serious feature.

Within the Brick is a Hitachi Deskstar hds72505 hard disk with a capacity of 500GB. In our tests, the Brick managed a sustained transfer rate of 36.5MB/s and an average seek time of 9.2ms, which makes it a more than respectable performer compared to all but the FireWire external disks in our external hard disk Labs (Issue 104, page 88).

We copied 100MB of large files to the Brick in 3.1 seconds, while 100MB of small files took 6.3 seconds – transfer rates of 32.3MB/s and 15.9MB/s respectively. Performance comes at the expense of noise from an internal fan, though. Best of all, at $493 (99 cents per GB), the LaCie Brick isn’t much more expensive than most 500GB internal hard disks. It’s a useful and fast way to keep your backups up to date.


LaCie Brick 80GB
The 80GB version of LaCie’s Brick uses Western Digital’s WD800VE notebook hard disk. It uses an additional USB plug to power it rather than the 500GB version’s external power supply. In our tests it managed a sustained transfer rate of 28.1MB/s and an average seek time of 13ms. 100MB of large files transferred to the Brick in four seconds, while 100MB of small files took 25.6 seconds giving moderate transfer rates of 25MB/s and 3.9MB/s respectively.

Despite the smaller internals, the case is as wide as the 500GB brick – which can help for stacking but is bad for pocketability. At $2.56 per GB it’s quite pricey for storage and represents poor value compared to its bigger, faster brother.