http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/0 [...] index.html

Forget about boosting storage capacity with old-fashioned hard drives: external devices are the way to go. We looked at four 500-GB products from LaCie, Western Digital and Wiebetech.

ESATA sounds nice.

Can you boot vista from one of these devices? Would it be reasonable to build a vista system (or clone one) on to one of these devices, to be used to quickly get an os up so that you could restore your system quickly?

Hmm..., How about including some external enclosures in one of these tests since they do compete directly in the marketplace. How about say an Icy Dock with a 160gb raptor using esata. I'd really like to see how those numbers stack up. Obviously you couldn't test every permutation but it would be nice to see a few.

@geofelt - if it's eSata your mobo can't tell if it's inside or outside your case. It should work as a bootable device. This would also make it a candidate for a cloned system that you know works perfectly (RAID1 of course is a mirror, different from a backup).

I suppose it's fairly hard to mess up a review like this, maybe Tom's is trying to get Mr. Schmid some practical experience since his last several dozen articles were over his head, but somehow he failed to color the bars in the performance tests to indicate which items he was testing! With a list of many different drives, are we supposed to look through and read to find where the 4 tested ones are? NO! You color them bright blue so we know if it's better or worse than what you've already tested.

Pretty much these new Tom's articles I just check to see if Mr. Schmid was involved. If not, I might read it, otherwise I skip the words, it's almost certainly bound to be an exercise in futility.

I wouldn't have minded seeing IEEE-1394a transfer diagrams since the "b" variant is even more rare than "a". Also, it would have potentially been more useful if all the drives were tested with the same hard drive so it would be more "apples to apples"... especially since vendors may not use the same model of drive in all of their external HDs.

-mcg

We were looking at Lacie backup systems for a couple years, but were always put off by the price.

We're now using Seagate 500g NCQ drives inside NexStar 3 external enclosures with E-SATA (2 different systems). Couldn't be happier with both the performance and price. If we ever decide to go with a RAID 5 or 10 array, this will be the perfect solution. The external drive enclosures run much cooler than the PC case.

Some of these other external enclosures should be added to the review as I suspect price/performance would slant heavily in their favor.

Our experience with LaCie was not positive. For my kids school we purchased two 2TB drive units the bigger brothers of the units reviewed. One failed after a few months and was promptly repaired. The other's power supply (wallwart) failed and had to be replace. The first unit failed again after 14 months and since it was off warranty, LaCie refused to repair it as it does not repair out of warranty units. I suspect that one of the 4 IDE drives is bad, but there are no tools to determine which is defective. So, LaCie expects you to discard the unit, or maybe search the internet for clues on how to fix it.

I was told "In today's market smaller storage products have become a consumable product and out-of-warranty repair charges are not cost effective. " Note, "smaller" includes 2TB, 4 drive units with 6 components that may fail: power supply, controller board, 4 hard drives that are covered by 12 month warenties.

My personal opinion is that this policy may make it easier for LaCie, but it it the height of environmental irresponsibility and should be rerewarded by their customers accordingly.