Digital Trends

Lacie d2 Quadra 500GB

February 29th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

Like most backup drives these days, all that is in the box is the drive, cables and the power brick. There’s no software disc because it’s all on the drive. We plugged the drive in and decided to use the FireWire cable since we were fresh out of USB ports. We wanted to try out eSATA, truth be told, but our motherboard lacks eSATA support. 

Initial Setup

We first plugged the drive in using the supplied FireWire cable and heard the familiar “cha-ching” sound of new hardware being detected, but then Windows asked us to insert the driver disc for our new hardware. We didn’t have a disc, so we just ignored the error.

During installation of the shortcut button, it asked us for drivers but we had none.

Next, a window opened and told us we needed to format the drive before we could use it. It gave us the option of formatting the whole drive as NTFS to work with Windows PCs, or to dedicate a small chunk as an “exchange” drive that would be formatted as FAT32 and thus compatible with Macs and Linux. This is a very cool feature, and one we have not seen offered by other drive manufacturers. We chose to make a small Exchange partition, and were then prompted to determine the partition’s size by moving a small slider. The minimum size allowed was 1GB and the maximum was 32GB.

You can create a FAT32 partition to play nice with Macs and penguins, which is handy.