cool-looking piece of gear

Ordered this, it arrived quickly. Worked right out of the box and looks cool sitting on my desk. Transfer speeds are limited by USB 2.0, so if you want faster data transfer buy the version that has something like 4 more connection options. I'm cheap, so I went for the budget version of this drive. It's suited me perfectly so far. I'd definitely recommend.

Beautiful & solid design

This was purchased as external backup - it's quiet and lovely. The blue LED reflects off the surface (desktop) so you know when it's in use. Easy to use backup software included, but not robust enough for a power user or tech-geek (use cobian!).

The USB cable is kinda short, about 8", so if you're not planning on placing this directly next to or on the box you're backing up plan to purchase or use a different USB cable.

LaCie 301304U

I attached this 1-TB USB external drive to my 2.8 ghtz IMac. The setup was a snap, but the included utilities wanted to take the whole drive as a single partition. I used the Mac's disk utilities, and created two partitions. This way, one partition can now be used for Time Machine (which by the way, will keep backing up until the disk is full, then begins deleting the oldest files), and another partition that is used to back up my Linux server.

The rest of the setup was fast. The Mac found the drive quickly, and so did Time Machine. The Time Machine software asked me which partition I wanted to use, and once that was decided on, Time Machine took off, and has been backing up ever since. How simple is that?

Also, most of the specs I read on this drive show a cache of 16 mb, but the drive as delivered, much to my pleasant surprise, has a cache of 32 mb. Even with the USB connection (I think firewire, which is available on some other La Cie drives, is about 15% faster), I found  more

Quick easy backup and restore and pretty too!,

Quick easy backup. And when I needed to do a complete restore, that went very fast and was perfect. What more could anyone want? And the thing is very nice to look at.

Reliable

So far, this has been a fairly reliable add-on to my system. Vista added the drivers automaticly and it seems to be working rather well. The transfers from drive to drive are a little slower than I'd like but over all a good buy for the price.