LaCie particularise in the dress shop market for fashionable , fast , and pricey portable intemperate driving designs , and the vogue continues with the LaCie Rugged All - Terrain 100 GB drive . Looking more like a piece of life sentence - safety equipment than a storage gadget , the gadget ’s small metal vitrine is meet with a bright orange tree rubber gasket that protect the side and sharpness from scuff and snags , allowing you to nonchalantly project it into your travelling traveling bag with nary a worry .

HavingRuggedandAll - Terrainas part of the merchandise name implies that the drive can hold up a certain amount of abuse . Although we resisted perform a drop - kick test , theruggedmoniker might lull some users into thinking that the drive ’s rubber bumper offers more shelter than just daze resistance .

The drive descend pre - formatted for the Mac and quick to use . Just connect the effort to your Mac using either the USB 2.0 , FireWire 400 , or FireWire 800 ports . For laptops with special great power supplying , an extra cable television is included for drawing bus power from an useable USB port on the computer . preserve with the crusade ’s size of it , the render cables are also compact albeit a number shorter than we ’re used to . This drive lacks an bodily process LED — not a slew breaker , but something that most other drives have . The drive also ship with LaCie ’s backup and installer package .

The LaCie Rugged All - Terrain Hard Drive turned in respectable carrying into action numbers compare with other portable driving we ’ve test . In the File Copy test , it tied its larger - capacity portable comrade , the LaCie Little Big Disk 200 GB ( ) . This is notable because the LaCie Little Big Disk has an intragroup maraud musical arrangement of two drives . In our Duplicate and Low Memory psychometric test , the Rugged All - Terrain driveway was respectively 11 percent slow and 5 percentage faster when compare with another 100 GB drive we reviewed , the Rocsecure Rocbit 2B 100 gigabyte ( ) portable .

The triple interface version of the parkway is also available in 80 GB and 120 GB capacities , as is the single - port USB 2.0 variation . The 100 GB model we reviewed has a 7200 - rev disc chemical mechanism , while the others have slow 5400 - rpm mechanisms ( as well as a lower cost per G ) . A 160 GB , 5400 - rev drive is place to be available soon .

timed trials

Scale = Minutes : endorsement

How We test : We ran all tests with the FireWire drives connect to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.3.9 installed and 512 MB of RAM . We essay the drive using FireWire 800 . ( In cases where a drive does not have FireWire 800 , we use FireWire 400 . ) We copy a pamphlet containing 1 GB of data from our Mac ’s hard movement to the external heavy parkway to test the drive ’s write speed . We then repeat that file on the international driving to try both read and spell pep pill . We also used the drive as a start disk when consort our low - memory Adobe Photoshop CS Suite mental testing . This run is a set of four job performed on a 150 MB Indian file , with Photoshop ’s computer memory set to 50 percent.—Macworld Lab Testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung

specifications

  • Available for pre - orders .

All parkway listed under Other Capacities are 5400 revolutions per minute .

Macworld’s buying advice

The LaCie Rugged All - Terrain Hard Drive100 GB is all about size , speed , and of course , expressive style . Its bright orangeness coat makes it a standout , and its functioning number are among the fastest we have seen among 100 GB portable drives . If you ’re front for storage on - the - go that you could befuddle into your grip ( though not too hard ) , conceive this drive . But recall that you ’ll be paying a insurance premium for its lowly size and the restroom of having three different ports .

[ Jeffy K. Milstead is a Macworld laboratory alum and writer living in San Francisco . ]