LaCie Brick Desktop Hard Drive (250GB) review

The LaCie Brick is your standard USB external drive, except for its aesthetic design -- it comes designed and painted like a Lego brick. This allows you to conveniently stack Bricks on top of each other if you need the additional storage and are cramped for space on your desk. The Bricks come in a variety of sizes: 160GB (white); 250GB (red); 300GB (blue) and 500GB (red).

Setting up the drive is a simple task and can be done in a matter of minutes, if not less. It comes with a single USB cord and an external AC power adaptor. One downside we found is that the USB cable is rather short -- about 0.6m -- so you will have to park the drive very close to your computer, perhaps even on top of it if you use a desktop that sits on the floor. Some users will be fine with this, but we'd like a longer cord to have more flexibility in positioning the drive. LaCie throws in some disk management software for just about any operating system imaginable, which is a nice bonus. It also comes with 1-Click software that allows you to easily set the target folders and default sources for easy copying, all at the touch of a button.

On CNET Labs' benchmark test, the LaCie Brick performed quite well with transfer speeds. The Brick took a little more than 21 minutes to write our 10GB test folder to its disk. The read tests reported a blazing score of 8 minutes copying our 10GB folder back to the test machine. These are excellent scores for practically any USB 2.0 drive on the market today.

The LaCie Brick makes for a practical and inexpensive (around £110 for the 250GB version), uniquely designed desktop drive that should suit the needs of almost any consumer in the storage market. Throw on some blue and white Bricks, and you've got yourself a storage Lego fortress to be reckoned with.

Edited by Felisa Yang
Additional editing by Kate Macefield