When it comes to outside hard drives , FireWire is a Mac drug user ’s best bet . you’re able to use a FireWire drive to speed up up your backups , provide a little elbow room for all of the data file stack away on your computer , and with most FireWire hard drives , boot up your Mac in a taking into custody . If you ’re in the market for a FireWire hard drive , you ’ll incur the LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface 300 GB drive an excellent choice . It has of all of the above niceties while also offering a full complement of joining options and great public presentation . ( For more reviews of these drives , see Buyers ’ usher : FireWire hard drives . )
The d2 Hard Drive Extreme , with its attractive aluminum designing and glow profane light , can be laid plane to easy stack multiple d2 driving force or , with the included stand , it can be lay vertically to take up very small screen background space . you could connect the d2 Hard Drive Extreme to your Mac via FireWire 400 , FireWire 800 or USB 2.0 . The USB 2.0 embrasure wo n’t be useful when you need to boot your Mac , but it will occur in handy when you need to tie the drive to a microcomputer , which probably wo n’t have a FireWire port .
LaCie includes a compact disc of software utility , most of them for Windows and OS 9 users , that includes the low LaCie Backup Software 1.0 for operating system X. This program is well-fixed to use and configure , but not nearly as full - featured as EMC Dantz ’s Retrospect Express , which is let in with some other drives . For model , Backup does not let you schedule a clip to mechanically scat a script and it will not back up data incrementally .
When connected to our exam Mac via FireWire 800 , the d2 Hard Drive Extreme drive posted some telling trial event . Of the twenty or so screen background drives we ’ve tested of late , the d2 Hard Drive Extreme posted the fastest time in our low - memory Photoshop CS cortege and breathed down the cervix of the leaders in the rest period of the test .
timed trials
Scale = minute : minute
How We test — We ran all tests with the FireWire drives get in touch to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.3.7 installed and 512 megabit of RAM . We tested the effort using FireWire 800 . ( In cases where a drive does not have FireWire 800 , we habituate FireWire 400 . ) We copied a booklet hold 1 GB of data from our Mac ’s hard driving force to the external difficult drive to test the campaign ’s write speed . We then duplicated that file on the outside thrust to test both scan and write speeds . We also used the drive as a scrape disk when running our low - computer storage Adobe Photoshop CS Suite trial . This test is a set of four tasks performed on a 150 MB file , with Photoshop ’s memory set to 50 percent.—Macworld Lab Testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
SPECIFICATIONS
Macworld’s buying advice
With almost every conceivable connection option available , a low cost per G , and top performance , the LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface is a great economic value .
[ James Galbraith isMacworld ’s science laboratory director . ]
