Digital Trends

Lacie d2 Quadra 500GB

February 29th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Features and Design

Lacie’s is know for its wild and crazy external drive designs, but the d2 Quadra is a bit more pedestrian-looking than some of the company’s crazier designs such as the Lego Brick and Golden disk which is fine with us. Though the d2 works with both Macs and PCs it certainly looks more at home next to a Mac tower than it does next to a PC due to the similarities in appearance.

This model is a re-design of the previous model, which had smooth edges. Lacie has added ridges to the exterior to improve the enclosure’s cooling performance. The d2 now looks similar to a heatsink, and Lacie claims this new design adds 60 percent more surface area to aid in cooling.

The Lacie d2 Quadra – now with ridges!

Interfaces

Unlike most external backup drives that offer one, two or three ways to connect the drive to your PC, the d2 offers four interfaces, including eSATA, FireWire 400 and 800 and USB 2.0. It also provides all the necessary cables as well. This stands in contrast to the WD My Book we reviewed recently, which included an eSATA port on the drive but no cable in the box.

The d2 Quadra gets its name from its amazing quadruple interface selection.

Software

The d2 includes three software utilities that comprise its backup solution. The first is simply a utility that dictates what happens when you press the giant blue button on the front of the drive. You can have it launch your backup routine, open a program, or you can disable it.

The first of two backup programs is a Lacie utility that is simple and straightforward. You tell the software what files to back up and where to back them up to, and that’s it. You have to launch the backup manually though, as there is no scheduling feature.

Finally, Lacie includes EMC Retrospect Express HD for scheduled backups. You can choose to make the backups be straight copies of the files, or to have them be an “image” type of file that requires Retrospect to restore the files. Whenever Retrospect makes a backup it puts the files in a new folder and numbers them, so you can restore files from specific days if you need to do so.