LaCie LAC301998 500GB USB 3.0 Portable External HD

I've been using LaCie portable drives for at least 10 years now and haven't had any long-term issues with them either when constantly powered and used or when stored long-term un-powered. However it has become inevitable that I need to spend serious effort making them work on my Windows7 systems. I've deducted two stars due to the difficulty and tech skills needed to make them work, but give them three stars because they do work in the end. I'm sure many have returned their units thinking they are defective when it's actually the fault of the setup utilities (I did just this with my first Minimus drives). Bottom line, if they won't configure following the factory procedures there's little reason to care why they don't work. I wouldn't hesitate to return them if the configuration app fails and you don't want to tackle the tech job of making them work. I create a single partition on the drives and use them primarily for automatic backup of both NAS servers and Windows desktop/laptop systems, regularly rotating them with drive units in a safe-deposit box. I always exercise new drives for a week to burn them in before committing them to real work and important data. 10/5/16: Finished 168hr PassMark burn-in test on both and they passed. This should have flushed out infant-mortality issues. PROS: * Performance is faster than the smaller USB3 Porsche 3TB and 4TB drives I'm currently using. I'm seeing up to 125MB/sec using performance testing software on my workstation, and between 25-80MB/sec during various file copy operations. * I like the form-factor and case, and quiet operation. This is a robust unit for desktop use. It is smaller than some external drives, but certainly not small. Slightly larger in all dimensions than Minimus. * Aluminum case never rises above warm when actively running, but I wouldn't stack them on top of each other. The outer case is not wrap-around aluminum like Minimus, so is more vulnerable to dust and fluids than Minimus but since the opening is on the bottom it tends to stay clean. * The white mount-status light on the front is obvious and visible from many angles. * Comes with the same small power brick (12vdc 1.5A) as previous Minimus and Porsche drives and same power connector. External power must be used. Also uses the same USB3 data cable. In other words, you can connect both Minimus and Porsche drives to same set of power and data cables. CONS: * I've been consistently bit by the same Windows configuration application problems I had with both Porsche & Minimus and which others report (never completes else fails with errors and leaves the drive in a useless state, else does complete and you can't mount more than one LaCie drive at a time to a given computer.) Ad-hoc formatting attempts to make an improperly configured drive work will result in a disk which Win7 is inconsistent in mounting. The latest 5TB drive had a new rather nasty problem to resolve ["signature collision with another disk"] before I could finish manual reconfiguration. The good news is that there are native Windows tools that will properly repair and configure these drives but they aren't obvious and aren't for amateurs, and could cause damage to other good drives if not used carefully. Following LaCie tech support procedures is the trick, but they are hard to find and not current with new operating systems. * Vendor website doesn't have an obvious place to find duplicate files originally provided on the drives; if the configuration app fails (not uncommon) the files and documents on the drive may be lost and they don't appear to be available on the website. It's a good idea to save them someplace safe before running the configuration routine. Workarounds: in 2013 a LaCie tech support provided a link to a tech article that worked perfectly. As of 2016 it's still there but marked as unsupported. At the LaCie website enter "Fix volume corruption - Windows Vista" into the Knowledge Base Search box and a procedure article will come up. KEY POINT: A *critical* choice is to initialize the disk using GPT instead of MBR (the default), but this detail isn't shown in the article (tech support person made note of that gap but LaCie never fixed the document.) GPT is the magic initialization you must use for the drives to behave correctly. I no longer run their on-disk setup script since it usually causes damage that must be undone, and doesn't configure the drive correctly anyway; I now just manually run the LaCie website procedure... it's faster. My unit contains a Seagate ST5000DM000-1FK178 drive, a model with a surprising lack of useful online reviews. Given that Seagate purchased controlling interests of LaCie in 2012 it makes sense that LaCie units will use Seagate drives. It's exasperating that the Windows configuration problems continue. 3/31/2018 Update: The two drives in my backup rotation are working flawlessly after 18mo of 50% on-off cycling per drive. This is consistent with the several other LaCie drives I use. When they're running they stay running for several weeks before being shut down and swapped over... I'm not doing a lot of power cycling on them.