Lots of storage in a small container
By Lawrence I. Charters
January 30, 2017
LaCie’s Rugged Mini drive (and “rugged” is part of the name) is a nice, compact, portable, well padded hard drive. Compared to previous versions, the padding seems much improved, and the USB 3.0 interface provides much needed speed improvements with more flexibility; you can use it with a Macintosh (no driver required), a Windows computer (with appropriate drivers), or a Linux machine (again, with appropriate drivers).
The unit was tested with a MacBook Pro that has USB 3.0, and it is fast. Obviously, with an older Mac equipped with USB 2.0, it would have been considerably slower — but it still would have worked.
As for the “rugged” part, the drive was carted around to and from work for several months before making a cross-continental trip by car. No effort was made to abuse the drive (“That’s my data!”), but it didn’t object to the travel. I did have to make sure I carried the cable that came with it, as it is not a standard USB cable.
About the only flaw is the rather odd LaCie software. It doesn’t do much that you can’t do with Apple’s software alone, aside from have desktop icons that match the drive. The instructions on how to use the LaCie software would be better served with instructions on how to plug in the drive and use OS X’s Disk Utility.