Review LaCie has long prided itself on taking a somewhat more idiosyncratic approach to hard drive styling than its rival manufacturers do.

LaCie's Starck: not so much Iron Man, more aluminium, man

As the business has been gradually taken over by the companies that make the drives themselves - Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung and so on, all of whom have lower manufacturing costs than the likes of LaCie, the French company has dared to be different in order to differentiate.

Who can forget its bullion-style Golden Disk, the Lego-esque Brick, or the oddly named Skwarim, a small, pink square of a drive?

LaCie's obsession with design continues with its latest offering, a portable drive styled by none other than Philippe Starck, he of 1950s-space-rocket-style lemon squeezer fame. Whether the man himself sketched out the LaCie Starck's contours and curves, leaving the filling in work to junior members of his studio a la Rembrandt, or did the lot himself, we can't say. Either way, this is not your everyday drive enclosure.

For starters, it's clad in a seamless oval of 2mm-thick gunmetal-grey aluminium. The surface is textured, but it has an odd finish that, to us, gives the product an almost unpleasant, dusty feel, though it's thankfully a very long way from the glossy black plastic fingerprint magnets that so many other drives sport.

No, the drive hasn't melted...

The front of the drive is shiny: a chrome-look warped panel that looks like it got too hot and melted. Round the back is the business end: the integrated USB connector and cable.

Now this is a smart bit of design. The flattened cable fits snuggly against the inside surface of the drive's outer shell, and the connector clips in between. It's a neat way of stowing the cable and if it doesn't fit together as well as it might, it nonetheless means you won't ever be without a wire.

The integrated USB cable and connector fits snuggly

The connector is tricky to get out at first. You have to push the cable end into the drive in order to push out the bit that'll go into your computer. That done, you can pull the connector away from the drive with a fingernail then unwrap the cable. The latter's thick enough to retain the bends that allow it to fit back into the drive, though we found it hard to get the connector to fit. No matter - it just makes it easy to extract next time.

Releasing the USB connector reveals a tiny power port, for which there's a separate USB cable in the box. Should your system not put enough power out through one USB port, you can hook this cord up to a second port for extra juice. Since it's not a double-headed cable, you have more latitude in which ports you pick - usually, you can only use adjacent ports - and this is to be welcomed. The orange activity LED is round here too.

Connect the LaCie Stark up for the first time, and LaCie configuration wizard will auto-start, allowing you to choose the one or two partitions and the format of those areas depending on whether you'll use the drive with only one operating system or several. Whatever you choose, you can always re-format the drive using standard utilities.

It's large for a 2.5in HDD - and heavy

We choose Mac HFS+ so we could view the bundled software - Intego Backup Assistant for Mac users, and Genie Backup for Windows folk; adequate apps, both - but reformatted it to FAT32 for testing.

CrystalDiskMark 2.2 Results

Throughput in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Longer bars are better

File Transfer Results
2GB File

File-transfer speeds in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Longer bars are better

1GB Folder

File-transfer speeds in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Longer bars are better

We connected the drive to a PC and ran CrystalDiskMark. Next, we plugged the drive into a Mac and performed our customary file-transfer tests using a 2GB file and a 1GB folder containing 100 10MB files.

Not for juicing lemons

The Starck performed well in comparison with other 2.5in drives in our real-world file-transfer tests and in CrystalDiskMark, so we've no concerns about that aspect of the drive. Price is another matter, and LaCie's tariff puts the tested 320GB drive at £85 and the 500GB model at £110. Both are about a tenner more than average, but then 2mm-thick machined aluminium cases and Philippe Starck's design nous don't come cheap.

Aluminium, at least, has practical benefits: it dissipates heat, potentially boosting the drive inside's longevity - it was a Samsung in the review unit, by the way - and will give the drive a measure of shock resistance. Some buyers will appreciate its weight and the air of solidity it brings to the proceedings. Others will think it too big - it's certainly bigger than most of today's 2.5in external HDDs.

Ultimately, though it's about whether you like the look or not, and whether you're willing to pay a wee bit extra for a snazzier drive than most.

Verdict

Does design matter in an external hard drive? Even if you don't, LaCie's Starck is a decent performing drive that wins points for the built-in USB cable. No wobbly mini-USB connects here, we're pleased to say. But you have to be prepared to pay extra for the looks, which won't be to everyone's taste. ®

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