Out of the box, the first thing you will notice is that this drive is heavy. Yeah, it's casing is made out of real thick aluminum, and that weighs a bit more than your usual plastic shell.
Looks good though, with it's rounded edges and the matte gray finish - very stylish, indeed.
The functionality of it is somewhat I don't really get, though - when you drop the drive, it will still be useless after wards, because the discs inside, as well as the write/read heads, are not in a shock absorbent casing, so they will be shattered, misaligned or otherwise damaged. The outside, however, will probably remain pristine, thanks to aluminum.
A nice idea, though not very new, is that the drive comes with an attached USB-cable. It is a bit awkward to store and un-store it (just yank on it real tough and it will come out, don't spend your time trying to use button that is labeled "push" ...), but it is a really nice feature that you have all necessary tools on board to connect it to any PC anytime. It also comes with a separate second USB-cable for additional power, but I didn't need that with my PC, the attached cable provided enough power to run the drive.
After plugging it in the first time, a handy little tool appears that informs you that the drive has to be formatted first. You click through a few buttons and in less than three minutes (at least at my PC, which is a very old Windows XP machine from 2003 ...), it is ready to use.
After formatting, you will have 297 GB at your disposal - the rest of the 320 GB that it nominally has is occupied by service programs, software and the like (plus, the values stated on the box are always rounded to the next form factor, which in this case would be 320 ... not 300, as would be more accurate). But that's just an observation, no biggie - everybody else does it and it is a known fact by now.
Performance is ok, not lightning fast but also not snail like slow.
The LaCie backup software that comes with it does the job well - nothing fancy and not my personal favorite, but useful nonetheless.
To sum it up:
Pros are the easy installation, the good looks (if that is important to you ...), and the novelty factor through the aluminum casing. Also good is the attached USB-cable.
The only con I have is that it is not really the smallest, most lightweight external drive you can get. I have several other external drives, with plastic casings and internal shock absorption, that are much smaller and lighter and also better suited to be carried with you (because they have the shock absorption feature ...).
So, I would not necessarily recommend this drive for the road warriors out there. But I guess that was not the primary goal of LaCie when they (or Mr.Starck) designed that drive.
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LaCie Starck 320 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive 301891.
