LaCie Copilot BOSS 2 TB Drive — USB-C USB 3.0 Thunderbolt 3 with SD Card CF Card Slots, Drop Shock Dust Water Resistant, 1 Month Adobe CC (STGU2000400)

I got this to replace a WD MyPassport wireless pro which never worked properly from day one, and was hopelessly unreliable.I used this for storing video from my action cameras on a recent motorcycle tour. Just pop the sd cards into the slot, click the button, and all the video is copied to the drive. You can then reformat the card for the next couple of hours in the saddle. A major plus is being able to hook the CoPilot up to an iPad to view the videos or photos on it - no more carting a laptop on trips.With storage devices becoming so easy to lose now e.g. micro sd cards, it is really reassuring to know everything is backed up on this device.As an added bonus you can even use it a a power bank if your phone or tablet die (don't rely on it for a full charge though).

Took a while to finally make the decision to buy this. So far I am really pleased with its performance. Battery life is good. Adding the DS card for backup is simple and reliable to date. Connecting to iPad Pro, after a bit of firmware updating, reliable too. All in all its absolutely doing a great job. Hopefully this continues over time, but so far so good.

There's lots to like about this drive - and a couple of irritating points, enough to drop a star.Firstly, transfer speeds are good. Almost as good as the stated speed, when using USB 3.0. If you look at the photos you will see two screenshots. The slower one (173 MB/s) is when copying from a traditional hard disk drive to this LaCie. The faster speed (320MB/s) is copying from an SSD to this drive. This indicates to me that this drive is very quick at writing and was bottle-necked by the read speed of the source drive in the first speed test. Both tests were for a single 2GB mp4 file, of the type you might upload to YouTube (and hence want to backup).So far so good. The unit is protected by its garish, orange rubbery sleeve, not unattractive but not exactly demure either. It's not huge at around 13cm x 9cm x 3cm, but you wouldn't want to put this in your shirt pocket, it's too heavy for that.So why only 4 stars?A minor gripe is USB-C connector on the device, that is insufficient to power the device even when plugged directly into a USB 3.0 socket on my PC, so you HAVE to use the plug-in power supply.A major gripe is that the supplied plug-in power supply (5.4v @ 2A) has a lead so short that even during this limited testing in my workshop I had to use an extension lead as I could not connect it to a power socket and my PC from across the workbench. This absolutely requires a 3m lead.Also, I'm wondering why it's using a 5.4v supply when we have zillions of phone chargers to hand giving out a healthy 5v and 2A (or even more) using a standard micro USB plug. Proprietary plugs and power voltages are all very well but don't have a place in portable computer peripherals.The drive performs well, very well, but is let down by the ridiculous power supply lead length - try using this in a hotel room with the power socket on one side of the room and you on the bed with this unit. Come on, LaCie, sort it out.

Fast delivery and quick / easy to set up - happy that I now have loads of capacity for my photos 👍

The concept of the product is good, travel without a Laptop being able to review and back up photos on an external hard drive connected to the iPad. however, the software is very cumbersome and I had great problems in establishing a stable connection to the IOS devices. To get it to work at all it required several resets and appears more hassle than its worse.The item I received had a manufacture date of 2018 (it was introduced in 2018 /9), which suggest that apart from an initial batch no more were produced.Seagate, who bought out LaCie, do not appear to provide phone and email responses mist the mark. This support is provided from Athens and whilst a Seagate consumer drive was swapped reasonably quickly, I was concerned with their responsiveness have waited for 45 minutes on the phone and not getting to speak to anybody. Also, I requested a callback through their chat functionality, but the promised callback did not happen. The support that helped more than the manual and the Seagate support was online and helped to clarify my thinking on this product.Perhaps with future generation iPads having moved away from the lightening connector to USB-C, together with Apple's shared architecture using the same chip in iPads and laptops, I expect a usable external drive will soon become reality, however, I do not this that this product is it.In terms of the categories below, I would rate the storage capacity as adequate to good. It can easily cover a photography focused trip using a cropped sensor or full frame camera. Not sure how well it would work for video and some forums 7 online discussion detail video issues.The item is quite heavy and I have not been able to check whether it can charge a phone or iPad from its battery. The large iPad Pro needs considerable charging capacity. The drive is heavier that other rugged drives and a MacBook Air and rugged drive will provide far more options to the professional user than this product managed from an iPad.Finally, the software, is very cumbersome and if combined with unreliable connections turns this product into quite a time waster.

Useful storage facility.

I am happy with the Lacie copilot, it took me no time transferring Videos from my GoPro to the copilot whichIs very simple using the SD card. The issues arrive when you want to transfer the Videos from the copilot to the iPad and edit and store. Luckily after about 2 weeks I have worked this out. The email support and assistance from LacieIn my view is pretty awful. It took 2 weeks to answer my first query and I sent an email back regarding assistance and after 8 days, still no response. I did have a WD portable drive in the past and found the support was first class.I have now worked most issues out myself, no thanks to Lacie.

Great product, and a very quick delivery.