LaCie Rikiki 1TB USB 3.0 Black External Hard Drive 301952

Pros: real SATA drive inside!

Cons: This is a spinning media drive. If you drop it your data is probably gone.

Other Thoughts: I opened the case of this thing and found a Samsung ST1000LM024 SATA2 drive.

That is good news because if the USB connector gets damaged you can still retrieve your data using a regular SATA connection.

Some similar drives come with the USB port directly on the hard drive. With that, you loose everything if the tiny USB connection gets damaged.

Pros: - small
- handsome
- USB powered
- short cable
- works well with USB 2.0 or USB 3.0

Cons: I have not opened the case yet to determine if this is a native USB drive or a SATA drive with an adapter kit. It is much better if it is a SATA drive because if the connector breaks I can pull out the drive and rescue the data with a regular SATA connection.

Pros: I spent an hour browsing the Newegg site last fall to find the physically smallest external drive with the largest capacity and which also supported USB3; this item met the standard, and defeated all others according to this criterion.

Cons: For whatever nonsensical reason, this item is no longer available and has supposedly been "deactivated" on the Newegg site. I do not understand this.

Other Thoughts: I recently made the mistake of ordering much lower end Lacie 1TB drives, thinking they were what I had ordered last fall. The low end aspect of the drives I recently ordered consists of the drives being physically much larger, which is no doubt a low end attribute. I intend to send these back, and am disappointed that the top of the line product I had identified last fall is no longer available on Newegg. Either I will try to locate this item elsewhere, or I may need to waste another hour of my time browsing the Newegg site to find the smallest external drive with the highest capacity which is also USB3 capable.