LaCie LAC9000493EK d2 4TB Dual Thunderbolt 2 + USB 3.0 Professional Desktop 3.5 inch External Hard Drive for PC and Mac

I bought this external drive so I could store large audio sample libraries and software synthesiser libraries, which I use on my mid-2011 iMac running Cubase 10 Pro. I also use Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2.6, NI Kontakt and the full EastWest Composer Cloud Sample Library and lots of other software synths, sample players and VST effects. All of this takes up way too much space on my 1Tb internal drive, so I needed a fast external drive to allow me to store all my libraries in one place, with the speed to stream the audio to my iMac DAW without any lag. This external drive is perfect for the job. It has plenty of storage space for my vast sample libraries, allowing me quick loading of samples, and fast audio streaming . I use the Thunderbolt connection, and this is fast enough for my needs. I have had absolutely no issues with this drive, and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a fast external drive for streaming audio or being able to quickly load data. Build quality is excellent. Some people have complained about the brightness of the blue light, but I have the drive positioned behind my iMac screen so it's not an issue.

Very fast when connected via thunderbolt. The reasons I have taken two stars off of a 5 stars product see below/Star 1. The flashing light is irritating as hell and when trying to put blutac over it to stop the flashing, it disconnects the drive straight away when clicked. Lesson learned.Star 2. You can only connect one computer to it at a time via thunderbolt. It has two thunderbolt connections, so I assumed two thunderbolt connections would allow me to connect two computers. Unfortunately, it's for daisy chaining only.Overall, I would have another but these two points are very irritating.

Why:With a 2013 Mac Pro and a very fast 512 GB internal drive I was at a loss as to what external to get for data, mostly Final Cut X Projects that are 99% complete but not ready for archive. As a freelancer I don't have tons of cash to throw around so going for an external PCI-e SSD option was too expensive. I bought the 4TB drive. Also, at a later date I can get the 128GB PCI-e SSD add-on card for it if I need to do very demanding editing.Setup:Setting up was simple, just plugged in the Thunderbolt 2 cable, power cable and up it popped. Installed the setup file that was on the Lacie drive which allowed me to partition for bootcamp and OSX (basically Fat32 and a Mac file system). Once that had done the drives appeared in finder and was ready to use. Note, you can partition as all Mac if you like. Nice to have the option though.Speeds:10 minute HD video, about 4,500 files and 22Gig in size.===========================================Mac Pro => Lacie = 2 minsMac Pro => Synolgy NAS (Network drive) = 8 minsLacie => Mac Pro = 2 minsMac Pro >= Mac Pro = 1 MinNoise:It has a lot of rubber feet to reduce noise, made a slight hum so moved it to my GEL mouse mat that I use for the Time Capsule. Now it's silent when copying files. The blue light is quite bright but I have it placed so you can't see the light anyway so thats a non issue. On the Mac the manual says you can power the drive down by holding in the light if needed.Summary:So far very happy with speeds and cost. Faster than USB 3. Noticed that Time Machine backup had excluded the Lacie volumes from the backup so you may want to add that back in if this is a work drive. It's quick enough to work from, not sure about 4K+ editing but anything less should be realtime.Update (3rd August 2016)Would just like to say that this drive has performed great so far. I just managed to re-partition 256GB (without losing any files) using disk util and installed OSX Sierra Developer Beta 4 on it. OSX boot menu (hold alt on boot) shows the drive and boots from it fine so if you need an external drive to boot various versions of OSX from without damaging your existing OS then this works great.

Only USB worked, not Thunderbolt. Returned it and was reimbursed immediately by Amazon. 5th LaCie HDD that I have bought but the first to give any problems.

This drive seems excellent. It's fast and virtually silent in operation, and the build quality is very good.My only complaint (and the reason why it loses one star) concerns the big blue light. Like other users, I find it unbelievably distracting and unpleasant. I've positioned the drive behind my iMac, where I can't see it at all under normal circumstances, and the only evidence I can see of the light is a blue glow reflected on my desktop from behind the computer. Yet even so, it manages to be almost fit-inducing in its flickering. I thank my lucky stars I'm not epileptic. The thing is that the light (which doubles as a push-button) is big and bright; if it were only a pinpoint light it might not be so bad, but it's huge and casts a lot of ambient light. And when it flickers, it goes from 'absolutely on' to 'absolutely off' many times in rapid succession, which is incredibly unpleasant to witness. If it pulsed gently to indicate activity, and/or were buffered so that it didn't flicker so rapidly, there wouldn't be a problem. It'd be lovely if LaCie were able to issue a firmware update to fix this, though I don't imagine that'll be possible.So overall this is a really great desktop hard drive, but this one MASSIVELY annoying feature really lets it down badly. If it weren't for the flickering I'd have no hesitation in recommending the drive with top marks. As I say, the flickering is unpleasantly distracting even given that I can't see the light at all. It's almost enough to make me cover the big blue button with masking tape to hide the light entirely (but I don't really want to do that, because having confirmation that the drive is on or off is useful). So I'll live with the flickering reflected light (I've got used to it to a fair extent, though I still really don't like it in my peripheral vision), but I do wish the problem could be solved by having it pulse gently instead.

Excellent Choice,Fast and Reliable and Very Solid Product.Have used Lacie Hard Drives Before and found them very very Safe.

Nice drive, very quiet and fast using USB 3