back to article LaCie snuggles up to Apple’s slim 12-inch MacBook with fat HDD

LaCie has an external drive that can hook up to Apple’s single-port MacBook. The anorexic MacBook announced yesterday has only one USB-C port that is used to feed it power and transfer data, with no possibility of connecting other USB devices – or any HDMI, or Thunderbolt devices at all. Seagate’s LaCie external storage biz …

  1. Fuzz

    USB-C

    Surely you don't need a whole new drive to connect to a USB-C port, just a new cable right?

    1. gnasher729 Silver badge

      Re: USB-C

      I looked and they seem very hard to find at the moment. But then the new MacBook is "coming soon" and I hope cables would be "coming soon" as well.

      So this hard drive is really nonsense. Coming from LaCie, it is bound to cost excessive money. I'd rather have a drive that I can connect to any computer with the right cable. A cable with one connector on one side and two on the other side would probably be useful.

      In the end, the most likely users are those who never plug in anything except a charger into their laptop. On the other hand, there are things that would be useful for the person who _either_ carries the laptop around with nothing plugged in, _or_ puts it on their desk with lots of things connected. Having a single cable on the desk that I plug into the MacBook and that gives me power, a monitor, and USB devices, that would be useful. (Apple already sells power+monitor+1 USB port, but it's expensive). And since this is not Mac only and USB-C will be in wide use soon, there is money to be made.

      I'd suggest a box with a 3TB hard drive, cable connecting to power, cable connecting to monitor, connector for Ethernet, some USB ports, and _one_ USB-C cable where you plug in your laptop. At a reasonable price. We can all dream.

      1. macjules

        Re: USB-C

        I strongly suspect that this was intended to be a portable thunderbolt drive and the spec got changed at the last second.

  2. klaxhu

    the article sounds really like you are talking about a product that also has a integrated usb port or something ..and then I realised it actually doesn't!

    so what's so cool about this external hdd then? just that it support USB-C?

    big deal ...

  3. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    If it had a built-in hub we might be talking. As it is you still have to daily chain Apple's USB splitters off the side. Of course each USB splitter comes with a display adaptor too. What, you thought it was going to be cheap?

    http://store.apple.com/us/product/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c-digital-av-multiport-adapter

  4. EssEll

    And another thing...

    LaCie have probably the WORST customer service it has ever been my displeasure to try to navigate. I have a 2-BIG network RAID drive that's gathering dust because I can't get these feckers to respond to emails, calls, faxes or carrier pigeons (ok, maybe I didn't try carrier pigeon).

    1. Ralph B

      Re: And another thing...

      LaCie is French. They would have eaten your carrier pigeons.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: And another thing...

        2014 Seagate acquires Lacie and is now working in merging both companies.[3]

      2. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. DNTP

    Apple what are you doing Apple stop

    I assume this thing is powered over USB, because we might as well run this into the ground as hard as possible, which means whenever you use this external HD on the new 'book you're running it and your laptop off the laptop battery.

    Basically every new accessory people make for the new MacBook is actually going to be a highly ironic piece of performance art making fun of Apple's baffling design decision re: The Uniport, and maybe they can get government cultural subsidies for their efforts.

    1. jai

      Re: Apple what are you doing Apple stop

      how long is the power lead that you use to connect and charge your portable laptop while also backing up to disk or similar?

  6. jamesb2147
    Headmaster

    Just a blockhead here

    Wouldn't any block device be "Time Machine-compatible"?

    Pic is because that's what I look like right now. Let me know if I'm wrong.

    1. ThomH

      Re: Just a blockhead here

      Every directly attached block device is Time Machine compatible. Apple puts one of its arbitrary obstacles in the way only of network-attached storage. Not sure if it works with NTFS-formatted devices though; maybe they're just trying to communicate that the drive is HFS formatted out of the box? You know, very poorly.

      1. gnasher729 Silver badge

        Re: Just a blockhead here

        Network attached storage must guarantee to survive a crash in the middle of a time machine backup without any negative side effects. If your Mac gets unplugged in the middle of it, or if your NAS gets unplugged, or if you have a bloody BT router that kills WiFi whenever it feels like it. That's not easy to guarantee, and it doesn't help you with sales because your buyers won't know whether the NAS is rubbish or not until long after they bought it. (And it needs to support hard linked directories).

        Used a NAS for backups at work (don't know the make, I didn't set it up), and every few weeks it told me that something was wrong with my backup and a full backup was needed. That's not exactly how it is supposed to work, and I thought my chances to recover from a hard drive crash were not too good.

    2. jubtastic1

      Re: Just a blockhead here

      You would have thought so, but no, we had a G-Tech drive used for TimeMachine that would stop backing up after 24 hrs or so, some sort of firmware issue with its Firewire port was to blame.

  7. Electron Shepherd
    Facepalm

    The drive transfers data at USB 3 speeds of up to 100MB/sec

    Isn't USB3 5Gb/s? 100MB/s is quite a bit slower than that...

    Both ends of the cable are identical

    I'm glad both ends are identical - making just one end identical would be difficult!

    1. gnasher729 Silver badge

      If your drive only delivers 100 Megabyte per second, it doesn't matter how fast USB3 could be, you won't get more than 100 MB/s.

  8. Peshman

    I only average between 80 - 105Mb/s transferring large files over USB-3 on any of my external 3.5" powered desktop drives. The interface bandwidth theoretical speeds have nothing to do with real life performance.

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