The LaCie d2 Quadra 1TB Hard Drive handles multiple demanding professional tasks, including digital content creation, audio/video editing, DVD authoring, and web animation. It can be daisy-chained via FireWire or connected to your DV camera and is even bootable in FireWire for Mac and in eSATA for Mac/PC. Advanced features include 3-level power management (Auto/On/Off), using USB or Firewire, and software RAID 0/RAID 1 potential when daisy-chained with other drives. Fully loaded with all the best interfaces ¿ eSATA 3Gbits, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 ¿ it offers complete universal connectivity for PC and Mac users. Use it to easily store all of your files or back up your computer or small server regularly, whether at home or the office. With fast burst transfer rates of up to 105-115MB/s via eSATA, this industry-leading hard disk delivers superior performance. Setup and use is quick and easy; the preloaded LaCie Setup Assistant helps format the hard disk according to your needs. With the LaCie Shortcut Button (via USB or Firewire), you can easily launch any application with one push such as the included EMC¨ Retrospect¨ professional backup software for PC and Mac users. The d2 Quadra¿s new design is sturdy, compact and versatile, making it ideal for intensive professional use. The unique, fanless aluminum heat sink design with 60% more surface area for heat dissipation keeps it quiet and as safe as possible at all times. The d2 Quadra can stand upright, be stacked horizontally with other drives or rackmounted to save desktop space. System Requirements: Computer with an eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 or USB 2.0 port, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows VistaTM; 500MHz processor or higher, Mac OS 10.2.8 (Mac OS 10.3 for eSATA) or later; G4, G5, Mac Intel 500MHz processor or higher, Minimum 128MB RAM (512MB or greater recommended).

User Reviews about LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Disk 1 TB USB 2.0 FireWire 400 800 eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive 301442U (Aluminum)

This hard drive is great! It's not noisy and doesn't really heat up that much. I'm surprised at the stability and performance of this hard drive. There's only one thing - the shortcut button software is not compatible with Windows 7 so I can't use that feature. Also, they could use a better backup assistant software. But I could always use the Windows 7 built-in backup system anyway so I don't mind. What matters to me is its performance and stability which works superb! -- high performance

I received this 1.5TB Lacie drive this week and installed it on my system which is a Win7 Pro 64 Bit with a ASUS P6X58D Premium motherboard and i-Core 7/930 CPU. I chose the Firewire connection as it looked like it would be the fastest. Drive was found and proceded to do a Win7 backup. Twenty four hours later it still was not done. I than did some checking and found you needed to install a legacy Firewire driver. I did then than ran a simple drag and drop copy of a folder with 18GB. Sustained copy rate for the new Firewire connection was no more than 9 MB/sec. I switched over to a standard USB 2.0 port and the same drag and drop transfer rate went to 20-25 MB/sec. Another issue is that unless you buy the $69 upgraded version of their Genie backup software, there is not backup SW included that is Win7, 64bit compliant. I get the impression that Lacie though well made might not be up to date on the technology side (more issues with type of eSATA connection it will accept too). For now it works fine but it was disappointing to uncover these issues. -- Win7 64 bit shortfall

This is my second LaCie external hard drive. The first one was full, so I needed another. I use it as a place to keep duplicate digital images, which have been getting larger with technical advances. So, having a 1.5 TB storage drive was necessary. So far, it has met my expectations. It is faster than the last one I had and I suspect it will be quite a while before I fill it. -- external storage

First I'll comment on the drive itself. Then I'll offer some suggestions for Mac users who have run into problems getting the blue shortcut button to work.

Back in January I purchased a 1 TB D2 Quadra. I was and still am extremely satisfied with that drive, so when I needed another I bought the 1.5 TB D2 that is the subject of this review. The 1 TB unit was whisper quiet. To my dismay, when I hooked up the 1.5 TB drive it made a soft whirring sound as if it had a fan inside it. I exchanged it for another through Amazon. (They cross-ship with next-day delivery, which is great.) The replacement drive may be a little quieter, but in all honesty, the sound it makes is barely noticeable. And because I use the drive solely for Time Machine backups, it's not spinning that much anyway. Moving on to the positives: The heavy ribbed aluminum case is beautifully made. The drive sits rock-solid in its vertical stand. The drive has a three-way on/off switch with an "automatic" position that spins down the drive when your computer goes to sleep. Even if the drive is fully powered off, it nonetheless passes power through to any upstream devices in your Firewire chain. And I just *love* the look of the blue shortcut buttons on my two Quadras softly glowing side by side!

About those shortcut buttons... The first thing to do is make sure you have the most current software installed. The installation disks in the product box of many drives contained v1.2.4 of the LaCie ShortCut Button software. v1.2.4 is incompatible with Snow Leopard. In early March LaCie posted v.1.2.5 on its web site. v1.2.5 is Snow Leopard-compatible. You'll get a message about System Preferences needing to restart in 32-bit mode, but just click through it. The installation will take and you will be able to assign an application to the button. For me, though, that wasn't the end of the story. Frequently, pressing the button wouldn't launch the assigned application. When I'd look in the shortcut button preferences pane, the assignment would be gone. I'd reassign the application, but the misbehavior would eventually recur. I began to suspect that the application assignment wasn't holding between restarts. What solved the problem for me was to add a component of the shortcut button software to my login items. To do this, open the Accounts preference pane and select an administrator account. Click the Login Items button to open the Login Items panel. Click the + button beneath the list of login items and navigate to the following file: Your Hard Drive/Application Support/LaCie/LaCieShortcutButtonDaemon.app. Click Add and you're done. After I went through this process the shortcut buttons worked perfectly. Also, the software is intelligent enough to distinguish between the two drives. The shortcut button on one drive launches Carbon Copy Cloner; the shortcut button on the other launches System Preferences. Everything is now copacetic in hard drive-land! -- Eked Out That Fifth Star; Solving Shortcut Button Problems

This external hard drive is fantastic. It's compatability with my laptop's software along with the extra speed it gives me when running some programs is exceptional. -- LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Disk 1TB is fantastic