Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/22/review_lacie_golden_disk/

LaCie Golden Disk 500GB external hard drive

Shiny shiny

By Tony Smith

Posted in Personal Tech, 22nd October 2007 11:02 GMT

Review LaCie has been making a selling point out of designer external hard-drives for years, but as many of its rivals have adopted a similar strategy - those not slugging it out on price, that is - the French company been forced to up the ante with ever more outlandish products.

For every stylish Porsche-designed Firewire unit or heavy metal Little Big Disk - reviewed here - there's another that's totally off the wall. Take 2005's Lego-style desktop and mobile drives - a hit with some users' inner kid, but a mental block for many others. And what about last year's Skwarim micro HDDs, kitted out in bright blue and bright pink rubber-like plastic? Fetishists, please form an orderly queue...

LaCire Golden Disk
LaCie's Golden Disk: Midas touch

LaCie's latest, the appropriately named Golden Disk, is no less bizarre, perhaps. It's certainly the shiniest, most lustrous external hard drive we've ever seen. And we're not talking the mute matt tone of most spray-paint gilding but a true see-your-face-in-it yellow-metal mirror.

Size-wise, the Golded Disk roughly matches LaCie's Porsche desktop drive, and it's clearly the older unit's offspring. Both are largely unadorned but for a couple of logos on one side, the left, with an air vent on the other and a tiny orange activity LED in the bottom left-hand corner of the front panel. Round the back, there's the same DIN-style four-pin power connector from the same small AC adaptor, and a round push-button to turn the drive on. The Golden Disk also sports a printer-style USB port, for which there's a cable in the box. There's also a black polishing cloth to remove the fingerprints that the drive's shiny surface inevitably attracts.

But where the Porsche unit is clad in an austere, gunmetal-grey steel casing that says it means business, the Golden Disk is, as we say, very shiny, very golden and as camp as Butlins. It's not real gold - it's not heavy enough for that - but you could be forgiven for thinking you've gone and got an ingot.

It's the sort of item you'd expect to see in the Tate Modern, exhibited as a clever-dick comment on consumerism or a pithy po-mo pastiche of tasteless technology design, depending on your point of view.

LaCire Golden Disk
C3PO's ideal hard drive?

Or you might think it just plain tasteless, more crass than class. What stops the design being little more than a Chav's must-have is the gently rippled upper face, which distorts what's reflected off it like something out of a Hall of Mirrors fairground attraction. The look comes from French design house Ora-Ïto, which also includes Toyota, LG, Swatch, Renault and Virgin among its other customers.

Whatever, the Golden Disk is no gallery exhibit - it's a working desktop hard drive of 500GB capacity and equipped with a fast, 7200rpm disk connected over a USB 2.0 link.

To assay the Golden Disk, we used Register Hardware's standard drive test: we copied a 1GB folder containing 100 10MB files to the drive. We then duplicated the folder on the drive itself before copying it back to the host computer, in this case a 1.83GHz Core Duo-based MacBook Pro. All the tests were conducted half a dozen times and the timings used to calculate an average.

LaCie Golden Disk Speed Tests
LaCire Golden Disk - speed tests
Speeds in MBps
Longer bars are better

You can see from the results chart that the Golden Disk acquits itself well against Seagate's 750GB FreeAgent Pro, and by and large beats the lesser, bus-powered FreeAgent Go. In short, it delivers decent performance, but it's no market leader.

The LaCie drive is priced at £119 - not too much more than the £105 you can pick up FreeAgent Pro of the same capacity, that's not only slightly faster but also includes eSATA and Firewire connectivity as well as USB 2.0. A USB-only 500GB FreeAgent will set you back around £95.

LaCire Golden Disk
Not popular with Cybermen...

We expect the Golden Disk's street price to be lower than £119, but you'll still be paying a premium for the gilt look. And why not? There's no rule stating that external drives have to look plain and grey. If you want the best possible bytes-per-buck ratio, there are plenty of low-cost, no-style products out there.

But if you want an external hard disk that's a little out of the ordinary - and it's clear from Seagate's attempt to push the FreeAgent series' looks, just as Western Digital has done with its MyBook range, that many consumers do want more stylish hard drives - it's hard to think of a more glitzy, more ostentatiously auric drive than the Golden Disk.

Verdict

Only you, good reader, can say whether you think LaCie's Golden Disk is a sovereign solution or tasteless tat. What we can say is that it's a decent performer, so paying a premium for that snazzy casing doesn't mean you have to put up with shoddy hard drive.