If you own a Mac long enough , your media library will finally outgrow its baseborn beginnings and necessitate more outer space . If you ’re looking for a good amount of quick external storage , the bus - powered LaCie Little Big Disk mobile laborious drive is a top performer compare with other compact portable drives in its course of study — but at a damage . Its square yet fashionable metal envelopment give it surprising heft regard its small sizing , yet it is still light enough ( about one and a half pound ) to lug from home to spot and back .
get the fiddling Big Disk up and running is straightforward . The drive can either lie unconditional or operate vertically after attaching the add stall . The drive can be power from an available FireWire 400 or 800 interface on your Mac , or you’re able to apply the supplied AC adapter and connect via USB . Once instal , the drive mechanically rise onto your Mac desktop , ready to practice . Its two FireWire 800 ports let you to daisy - chain additional FireWire connections , although the relatively myopic cable that embark with the drive require it to be nigh at hand no matter which port you use .
A blue activity LED on the front indicates when the crusade is get at data from your hard crusade . The lilliputian Big Disk can boot OS X via FireWire , a feature article not endure by all FireWire drives these days . When compare to other portable driveway we looked at , the Little Big Disk was the winner in all three of our benchmarks , speed past the next libertine drive , Rocsecure ’s Rocbit 2B 100 GB ( ) , by 25 percent in the single file copy test and by 20 pct in the Photoshop test . Behind this spirited performance is the fact that , internally , the drive is in reality two drives configured as a level-0 ( striped ) RAID .
An of import thing to remark : modest , portable , busbar - powered parkway build up around 2.5 - inch mechanisms ( the actual drive inside the case ) top out at 160 GB mental ability . Because the LaCie Little Big Disk habituate two drives , you may get up to 320 GB of bus - powered portable storage . Thus , the drive is more expensive and bulkier than most portable drives ( but much little than most background drives ) plus it ’s bus powered , really tight , and available in capacity doubly that of other portable drives .
timed trials
Scale = Minutes : Seconds
How We Tested : We feed all examination with the FireWire drives connected to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.3.9 installed and 512 M of RAM . We tested the drive using FireWire 800 . ( In cases where a drive does not have FireWire 800 , we apply FireWire 400 . ) We copied a pamphlet hold 1 GB of datum from our Mac ’s hard drive to the external knockout drive to test the driveway ’s write focal ratio . We then duplicated that file on the international crusade to test both register and indite speeds . We also used the thrust as a scratch magnetic disc when running our low - memory Adobe Photoshop CS Suite test . This tryout is a solidification of four tasks performed on a 150 MB single file , with Photoshop ’s memory set to 50 percent.—Macworld Lab Testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
specifications
Macworld’s buying advice
If you ’re look for a low and relatively fast external drive , and you do n’t bear in mind paying a premium , the LaCie Little Big Disk 200 GB lets you take your sensitive library with you wherever you go . It fork out fast performance and give way you the maximum bit of connectedness option , all in an attractive and portable package .
[ Jeffy Milstead is a Macworld Lab alumnus and writer know in San Francisco . ]
