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Mississippi | LaCie (spelling) drives tended to fail for Debra and several people she knew. These were very stylish, thin models designed by the Porsche Design Agency, whatever that is. Photographers loved the look of them, but there were no fans. Just enclosed titanium-looking cases. They got hot and quit. There were several people complaining on one pro photo forum. I had a fanless to go bad on me, although it wasn't a LaCie. I'm thinking that LaCie doesn't make the drives, themselves, but buys them from another manufacturer and encases them in its own shell, but I can't verify that, just something I was told by a person with more knowledge.
As for telling whether they have fans or not, that can be tricky.
You can go onto a site like CompUSA's, for example, and find that the specs will sometimes list whether fans are part of the design. You also can get some idea about fans on the manufacturer's web site, maybe.
We haven't had much dealings with the really portable drives. They tend to be slower, like 5400 rpm, compared to 7200 or even the ultimate 10,000 rpm desktop externals. Debra tends to take a regular desktop model with her if she's got a lot of offload and does the work indoors. In the field, she tends to duplicate the camera cords onto her laptop's hard drive, then burns DVDs or CDs when she comes out of the field.
Until Debra attended a seminar on digital asset management, she had never heard of SATA drives. I had but couldn't have told you at gunpoint what they were.
Our next step will be to get an enclosure that holds multiple drives for mirroring. That allows you to run several drives with just one cord connecting to the computer. But that's down the road as she begins replacing some of the older USB externals.
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Consider SATA drives
