LaCie 250GB Brick External USB Hard Drive

Features of the LaCie 250GB Brick

The LaCie 250GB Brick's coolest feature is its design. The Lego design is unique in the hard drive world and was designed by Ora-Ito to allow you to stack multiple drives on your desktop. The Brick is a USB 2.0 only hard drive, with a max interface speed of 480Mbits/second.

The LaCie 250GB Brick includes some nice software such as one touch backup for Mac OS 10.2 and up, Windows 98SE, ME, 2000 and XP. Also included with the software bundle is Silverlining drive management utilities.

LaCie 250GB Brick in Use

The LaCie 250GB Brick was very easy to install on my Windows XP machine simply requiring me to plug it into the AC outlet and a vacant USB port. XP recognized the drive and installed it with no issues in less than a minute. LaCie used a Seagate drive inside my evaluation Brick as evidenced my Device Manager listing it as a Seagate ST3250823A USB Device.

I benchmarked the drive with a utility called HD Tach. HD Tach gave me a few numbers on the Brick, burst speed was a slow 37.6MB per second as compared to an internal Samsung V30 drive of the same capacity with an 89.6 MB/s burst speed. The Brick had a random access time of 15.8ms and an average read time of 37.2 MB/s.

While the LaCie Brick will win no speed contests, there is no denying its decent performance for an external drive. The Brick was very easy to install and comes formatted with FAT32. The brick also features a good software bundle as well as a low price making it very attractive.