Digital Trends

LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ (2TB) September 2nd, 2007 | by Jason Tomczak

Setup and Use

Setting up this 2TB Big Disk Extreme+ is easy, though you may need some muscle to heft the drive out of its packaging. Set the drive on a desk or table and plug the power adapter into the back of the enclosure and then into a wall outlet.

Select which transfer cable you'll want to use. (LaCie is kind enough to include a cable for each of the connections: USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800. That's pretty generous, especially in these times when tech companies are slimming down the extras given to customers.) Connect the data cable to the drive and your computer. As long as the drive's power switch is switched to "on" or "auto," the drive will power up and appear on your computer as an available drive.

You can begin using the massive amount of storage space right away or you can install the optional backup software that LaCie includes.

Installing the software — EMC Retrospect Express, for example — took less than two minutes. Retrospect Express has plenty of options for backing up your files or your entire system. I was able to configure the Shortcut Button to open up a program of my choice — Disk Utility — in mere seconds. It works perfectly. Whenever I want to change the program or action, I can do so in less than 10 seconds. I can even have the Shortcut Button open up my favorite song in iTunes! Awesome!

If the power button is switched to "on", the drive will never turn off. Use this option if you absolutely must have the drive running all the time. The lifespan of the drive will probably be reduced a wee little bit, and your electric bill will suffer. Ideally, you'd keep the power button in the "auto" position, allowing the drive to be on/active when connected to your computer, and hibernating when disconnected. If, like most people, you don't use the drive very often, keep it switched to "off" and/or unplugged from the wall outlet.

Available Space

Even though the LaCie "Big Disk Extreme+" 2TB drive is commonly thought to hold two terabytes of data, the actual usable space on the drive is 1.82TB. This discrepancy is normal. According to LaCie, 2TB should give you enough storage space for 152 hours of digital video, 540,000 songs, or 2,200,000 photos (0.9MB each, which is uncommonly small these days). Professional photographers wind up with RAW images no smaller than 5MB each, which means that this drive could hold upwards of 388,800 RAW images. 

Tons of Cache

The LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ 2TB has 64MB of cache memory. That's a lot! Each 1TB SATA drive runs at 7,200rpm and has 32MB cache. For reference, the drives used in the present production run are HITACHI Deskstar 7K1000 drives. Very nice.

The back of the drive