A weird quirk of LaCie drives: The desktop models feel like cheap crap, from the materials to the electronics (I’m particularly thinking of Neil Poulton’s drive), but their portable drives are solid. This Porsche-designed drive feels like it just might stop bullets.
The edges are are as sharp as they look, though. It’s a USB 3.0 HDD, with a Samsung drive as its core in the mobile drive we checked out (unfortunately, we didn’t have any USB 3.0-capable computers around, so we only got to speedtest its USB 2.0 abilities, average 28.3 seconds to transfer a 1GB file). The mobile drive starts at $US104.99 for 500GB, and its desktop cousins sell for $US119.99 and $US159.99 for the 1TB and 2TB varieties, respectively. [LaCie]