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SECURITY ALWAYS comes at a price. In the case of LaCie's Safe Mobile Hard Drive, which requires fingerprint identification before letting you access the contents, the financial price is actually very reasonable. At $200, the 80MB Safe is priced comparably to other 80GB mobile-friendly hard drives without any high-tech fingerscanning technology.
A higher price is actually paid in the time it takes to access your data and the extra power the drive requires to scan fingerprints. LaCie requires you to use two powered USB ports to connect the Safe, one for the connection and power, the other simply for power. These two cables are included, but there's no AC power adapter option.
One nice thing is that the Safe doesn't require you to install driver software. Connect its cables to a Mac, and its icon shows up on the desktop with a link to the setup software. This program makes you swipe at least two fingers across the scanner three times to read the fingerprint and then you choose a name for this user. Afterwards, you can create other user IDs with administration, read/write or read-only privileges; each user must also swipe at least two fingerprints. After it's set up, we recommend that you format it to the Mac OS Extended standard using Disc Utility, so that you can use long file names.
Every time the Safe drive is remounted, you must open its program software, scan a finger and wait for the drive to unlock with that user's assigned privileges. This takes a minute or two every time, but that's the price you pay to secure the hard drive's data. On the upside, the Safe never had problems recognizing the fingerprints of our various users or keeping out fraudulent users. Its normal drive performance was also very good, with transfer speeds of about 21MB/sec. (read) and 15MB/sec (write). The Safe has desk-friendly feet on the bottom, and comes with a padded carrying pouch.
–MARKKUS ROVITO
Safe Mobile Hard Drive 80GB: 
LaCie | www.lacie.com | 503-844 4500 | $200
Pros: Perfect reading of fingerprints, blocks unauthorized users, users can have different levels of access privileges, good transfer speeds, no driver installation required.
Cons: Needs two powered USB ports to operate, takes a little while to unlock drive access.
Requires: G3 or better, OS 10.2 or higher, two powered USB ports, 128MB RAM
macHOME recommends: Powered USB 2.0 hub
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