LaCieHDD Portable Hard Disk 4TB Rugged Thunderbolt USB – C Raid Pro Shockproof stgw4000800

Received damaged packagingLooks like the item was used before

I purchased this disk as I needed to move 1.4Tb of data from a 2011 iMac to my new iMac for 2019. After trying to use Migration Assistant (even with a Thunderbolt cable) it failed to move all the data and was frustratingly slow. I was able to move my photo and music collection in hours rather than days. I am not keen on the design, the orange bumper is to garish for me, however, the claim is that it does protect the disk and also that it provides a degree of weather proofing. I was impressed with the cables - built in Thunderbolt 1 & 2, with a connection for Thunderbolt 3/USBc and a spare leat for USB 3 as well as the thunderbolt 3 cable.I marked it down for portability as it is quite bulky and heavy. For me, if you are doing lots of photography with big images or movie files on the go - you need an SSD so that you can edit on the go, This disk is too slow for that purpose. It is overall though a great storage device and comes with software to make it Time machine compatible.

BE WARNED. The Lacie Set Up function when you first load the drive onto a MAC does not work. When found this issue, I sent the drive back and ordered a replacement. The replacement has the same issue. A warning comes up saying the set-up wont load. It also showed that the drive had no space left on the drive. So, there is obviously a fault in the batch sent to Amazon. It's a shame because I have bought this drive 8 times before and had no issues!I have now discovered that the drive cannot be loaded onto MACs with the latest operating system.

Nice to see a drive of this size that doesn't need a separate power supply. Quite bulky compared to some drives of this type, but quiet in operation. The rubber surround is a sloppy fit and peels off too easily. The interfaces though are very useful for Mac owners; the old Macs mostly have Firewire 800 and the new ones USB3.0 so it's well equipped for a variety of machines. Measured data transfer rates using Blackmagic (read/write) are about 75Mb/s on USB3.0, 70Mb/s on Firewire 800, and just over 30Mb/s on USB2.0. Write is slightly faster than read.Overall a very useful drive for Mac owners in particular and a handy tool for moving around large video and photo file sets.

Having the Thunderbolt and USB 'C' makes it very versatile. I already have a 1TB version that I use as a DJ, this 2 TB will be my backup for all of my music files and replace my very slow chunky HD that needs external power adapter.

After using the software on the drive (I Plugged it in using supplied firewire 800 cable), time machine recognised it and went ahead and made backups of my mac, so much faster than the time capsule I had attached to USB 2 port previously.