RedRobin
Dances With Dogs
- Messages
- 9,314
- Name
- Robin
- Edit My Images
- Yes
If you don't already know, LaCie are a brand of Seagate who design and manufacture hard drives and who have a long established excellent reputation.
As a photographer who occasionally travels I have always liked the LaCie Rugged range for the fact that they are easily portable and tough. When not travelling they are equally at home connected to a desktop computer. I only use Macs and so this practical review can only reflect that use.
I recently added the LaCie 4TB Rugged RAID Pro because it has a SD card slot to save me literally hours spent downloading my camera cards in a hotel room after a day of shooting. I have been known to shoot as many as 3,000 RAW images on a dawn-til-dusk day, but usually anything from 300-1,200. When away from home this external HD needs a laptop to see the images and select options accordingly.
In the past with other external drives when away from home it would take many hours to copy SD card contents firstly onto my laptop and then copy them again onto the external drive and finally to delete the copies on my laptop. Having said that, I now realise that I would probably have been able to use a card reader connected to my laptop and copy directly to the external LaCie via Image Capture as I do on my desktop machine, but I prefer the convenience of the LaCie having its own SD slot and consequently less faffing about. Also, I needed another 4TB drive anyway.
So LaCie include their software app called 'Toolkit' to manage a choice of RAID divisions and a default option to automatically load the SD card's contents. It is clear and easy to understand but I do not recommend using Toolkit's Automatic option because by default it buries your image files in a deep hierarchy of folders which subsequently makes accessing them very tedious indeed. Four levels of folder hierarchy is far too much and it matters when you use an app such as FastRawViewer (also available for Windows) to cull and colour code or star rate your photos for post-processing on your desktop machine after I get home. So I have deselected Automatic and instead use my MacBook Pro's Image Capture app to import images into the folders I create and name on the LaCie.
This professional photographer has made a good objective YouTube review in my opinion. It's better and quicker than I can write! - It starts after the unboxing etc at about 2:20s in :
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpe1Y_xZx3k
And I bought mine from my trusted HDEW supplier :
www.hdewcameras.co.uk
I think this LaCie Rugged Pro 4TB drive is very good value but the Rugged range offer quite a few different options - As always, it's Horses for Courses.
As a photographer who occasionally travels I have always liked the LaCie Rugged range for the fact that they are easily portable and tough. When not travelling they are equally at home connected to a desktop computer. I only use Macs and so this practical review can only reflect that use.
I recently added the LaCie 4TB Rugged RAID Pro because it has a SD card slot to save me literally hours spent downloading my camera cards in a hotel room after a day of shooting. I have been known to shoot as many as 3,000 RAW images on a dawn-til-dusk day, but usually anything from 300-1,200. When away from home this external HD needs a laptop to see the images and select options accordingly.
In the past with other external drives when away from home it would take many hours to copy SD card contents firstly onto my laptop and then copy them again onto the external drive and finally to delete the copies on my laptop. Having said that, I now realise that I would probably have been able to use a card reader connected to my laptop and copy directly to the external LaCie via Image Capture as I do on my desktop machine, but I prefer the convenience of the LaCie having its own SD slot and consequently less faffing about. Also, I needed another 4TB drive anyway.
So LaCie include their software app called 'Toolkit' to manage a choice of RAID divisions and a default option to automatically load the SD card's contents. It is clear and easy to understand but I do not recommend using Toolkit's Automatic option because by default it buries your image files in a deep hierarchy of folders which subsequently makes accessing them very tedious indeed. Four levels of folder hierarchy is far too much and it matters when you use an app such as FastRawViewer (also available for Windows) to cull and colour code or star rate your photos for post-processing on your desktop machine after I get home. So I have deselected Automatic and instead use my MacBook Pro's Image Capture app to import images into the folders I create and name on the LaCie.
This professional photographer has made a good objective YouTube review in my opinion. It's better and quicker than I can write! - It starts after the unboxing etc at about 2:20s in :
And I bought mine from my trusted HDEW supplier :
404 Not Found - Retailer of Photography Equipment & Electronics
Online Retailer of photography equipment & electronics. Including DSLR cameras, lenses, laptops, tablets, batteries, filters. From Canon Olympus Sigma Apple Samsung LaCie Sandisk & Adata.
I think this LaCie Rugged Pro 4TB drive is very good value but the Rugged range offer quite a few different options - As always, it's Horses for Courses.
Last edited:
