Lacie’s tradition of making designer hard disks continues with this Neil Poulton model.

The unit's striking black enclosure is barely bigger than the 500GB 7,200rpm Samsung drive that resides inside it.

A flashing activity-LED strobes light onto any surface in front of the device – ­ it’s very bright and can get rather annoying.

Basic back-up software is included, but when the Lacie disk isn’t present the software rather pointlessly started backing up to the same hard disk as the source folder.

Using HD Tune, we measured 62.8MBytes/sec average transfer rate using eSata, which represents good performance. Using USB or Firewire 400 (included) performance dropped, but it does have great connectivity for the price.