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LaCie gets terrible reviews on apple.com, why?

Aniej

Aniej

macrumors 68000
Original poster
I am looking into getting an external hard drive and have to be honest, I have never seen so many bad reviews as the LaCie products listed on apple.com If things are as bad as the 84 reviews say for the 500GB version, why does apple keep the product listed on the site? It makes me think the reviews are coming from a few people who work for LaCie's competition or the product is really just a hunk of junk. Any insight would be helpful.

Also, any experiences with G-tech would be great to hear about as well.
 
Aniej said:
I am looking into getting an external hard drive and have to be honest, I have never seen so many bad reviews as the LaCie products listed on apple.com If things are as bad as the 84 reviews say for the 500GB version, why does apple keep the product listed on the site? It makes me think the reviews are coming from a few people who work for LaCie's competition or the product is really just a hunk of junk. Any insight would be helpful.

Also, any experiences with G-tech would be great to hear about as well.
Click to expand...

I have 2 G-Tech drives and they are great. I had a LaCie that was just fine. The build quality of my G-Tech drives is much better though. Easily worth the premium price.
 
I've owned one LaCie drive and personally I didn't like it because it was loud. I didn't like the design of it either. I've heard a lot of people have had hard drive failures? I don't think I used it long enough to experience anything like that. I now have a G-Tech drive that I love. It's amazing.
 
I don't see what the big deal is. I've had a Porsche 250GB external Lacie for about a year now and had no problems whatsoever. All it is is a box with a harddrive in it! The disk is a Seagate which is pretty much unbeatable. As long as you get a box with a reliable disk in it there isn't all that much that can go wrong.
 
I Hate Lacie

while some people on this forum have probably never had any major problems with lacie, I unfourtunately, cannot recommend this company as a good drive company. I have had 2 hard drives from them, a D2 120 GB and a big disk 500 GB FW400 & FW800 drive. Two of my buddies each had a D2 200 GB drive, and guess what, ALL OF OUR DRIVES DIED.

I am sorry, but I friggin HATE lacie, and will never recomend any of their products to anyone. I agree with the said above, get a G drive, the build quality is fantastic.

Most of the HD from all of those failed drives were IBM drives. This was also when lacie was using What I believe was the 950 FW chipset which had some problems with it. maybe I just had bad luck, but anytime Im in an apple store and I see someone looking at a lacie I just have the urge to go over to them and tell them to not get it. They may look pretty, nice silver finish and a blue light, but for the cost, I have not been happy with their drives at all.

I lost over 50 hours of footage, all my music, some PSD documents, all cause of the crappy lacie drive. See what happens is, it will mount, but it wont let you drag any of the files off of the disk. If you try and access them directly from the disk, it hangs and you get the spinning beach ball of death.

I mean, if this happened once, I could understand, but to 2 of my buddies drives, and 2 of mine? C'mon lacie, I thought you were better than that. My advice, get the g drive. My bro got one and has never been happier.
 
wow. ok well then it looks like it my latter thoughts were correct and LaCie has had and has some really bad issue. I have no desire to even risk any of these horror stories happening to me, the risk alone is enough to suggest another product. I like the G-tech as that other option and think I am probably going to go with that one, albeit in the 320GB model and not the 500GB because of the cost. But the cost of a failure and the pain is much more. Thanks to all for the comments.
 
I like mine. I have had it over 2 years. (porsche 160gb). When I first got it the drive that they used was not compatible with my mac. I went through 3 of them
returned and none work. LaCie orchestrated a recall based largely on my issue
with the drive. Finally they got it right and I have had the same one ever since.

It dropped once and i thought it was toast. it acted weird but I turned it off and back on again and it was fine. No problems since.

I just backed up that drive on to DVD (7 DL discs) which is good practice for what ever drive you use.

I worked for some lady who used maxtor drives (360gb). i worked for her for 2 months and she (idiot) had them on the floor, wires tangled. She knocked a couple over at seperate times and paid dearly to recover them. (like 4 grande each). she said she didnt like LaCie, but she spent 8 thousand $$ to clean room recover info from maxtors. (they were vertically mounted and just tipped over, you wouldnt think they would be so sensitive). She still uses maxtor (and PC, yuch) for her photo business.



I am glad i didnt knock them over.
 
I've had a Lacie 20GB drive for about 6 - 7 years. Apart from it being louder than my Quicksilver I've had no problems.
 
I've been really happy with my d2 500GB FW400/800 & USB2. I was even thinking of getting another to complement it down the road, since it's been less noisy than my IceWarrior and my DigitalDrive. G-Tech drives look great, and I'd certainly consider them in the future now that I know LaCie seems to be failure-prone, but their prices are about double of other manufacturers. That's really steep.

One company I'd recommend against is Formac, based on my personal experiences. I bought their Oxygen 500 model, which was really two 250GB drives (they mount separately too) stuffed into a cheap plastic case. It was loud and whiny when I got it, so I sent it back for repair -- at my expense, of course. It came back worse than before. Now it occasionally grinds and squeals during power-on, like an over-revved engine. Never, never again.
 
I dunno what the deal with lacie is, perhaps the quality is just hit & miss as some people (myself included) have never had a single problem with them while others have have had tons & tons of failures. I remember the tech at the computer store my mom goes to also said they are crap and they fail.

But I've had mine for almost 3 years now with no problems and my buddy got one at the same time and also no problems. *knock wood* so I dunno.
 
I have one of the 500GB G-Tech's and I find it to be very loud. Even at idle. When I turn it on it almost sounds like one of those 10000RPM drives as it continues to rev up to full speed for longer than I would expect. Not sure what make drive is in there.
Having said that, it makes up for it in build quality and in speed. It's excellent in those areas.

I also have a 250GB G-Tech drive at work which is noticeably more quiet.

If it's silence you want, go look for Western Digital drives. I have 2 of these in my Mac and they are both very fast and very quiet.

As for Lacie, I've had bad experiences with those. I know of atleast 4 Lacie drives (one my own, others from friends/collegues) that have failed beyond recovery. This was a few years ago, so things might have changed since then. I've sworn off of them for good though. 🙁

Allotriophagy said:
Anyone know how loud the G-Tech units are? And is there anywhere they can be bought without hard drives?
Click to expand...
 
mfacey said:
I don't see what the big deal is. I've had a Porsche 250GB external Lacie for about a year now and had no problems whatsoever. All it is is a box with a harddrive in it! The disk is a Seagate which is pretty much unbeatable. As long as you get a box with a reliable disk in it there isn't all that much that can go wrong.
Click to expand...

This is exactly my experience too. I'll always go for a Seagate drive in a LaCie case if I can. I've bought an Iomega drive more recently and it's junk compared with my faithful 160 gig LaCie Porsche drive.
 
Build a drive...

Buy a quality case with a chipset you trust, and get a bare drive with great warranty and a big cache.
 
I have a theory

This could be a newbie that doesn't know how to treat an external drive. They may be moving it around between locations without the proper care. Treating them like iPods as far as portability. Or it could also be heat issues and the drive isn't able to cool itself enough with the fan and case design.
 
Aniej said:
I am looking into getting an external hard drive and have to be honest, I have never seen so many bad reviews as the LaCie products listed on apple.com If things are as bad as the 84 reviews say for the 500GB version, why does apple keep the product listed on the site? It makes me think the reviews are coming from a few people who work for LaCie's competition or the product is really just a hunk of junk. Any insight would be helpful.

Also, any experiences with G-tech would be great to hear about as well.
Click to expand...

I know that doesn't answer your question, but you might want to look at a HP MyBook. Best bang for a buck, 3 years warranty (at least over here in Europe), and very quiet.
 
I've had a Lacie 250gb for a couple of years and it's been fine, if a little noisy.

I've just bought an Iomega Ultra Max 640gb. It's very quiet, matches my G5 and comes mac formatted 😉
 
As a less expensive but still quite good alternative to the G-DRIVEs, consider the OWC Mercury Elite Aluminum. Good chipset, available as a case alone if you want to use your own drives, nice look and feel, quiet so far (fanless, but no drives are absolutely silent). I have four of them and like them.

I also have had 3 LaCie d2 hard drives, one of which failed a few weeks after warranty expiration. I like the look and feel of the LaCies, and I love the mini rack I have them and a LaCie d2 DVD burner mounted in, but... after that one failure, I'm a bit skittish about them. I'll probably replace the HD in the failed one and see if it works OK.
 
i know this is off topic, but perhaps someone can shed some light on my situation...

i have an external drive (samsung spinpoint 8mb cache - VERY happy with it, mind you) connected via usb and cannot find a way to format it so that i can extract my dvds to that drive... it doesn't allow for filesizes over 1gb (I believe)... anyone know if this is even possible, and if it is, how should the drive be formated?

thanks,

n
 
Remember that LaCie only makes the enclosure. What's inside is still from a different manufacturer, namely hard drive manufacturers.

Hard drive failure is quite common.
 
i have had a few LaCie drives, but i am going to upgrade to more space soon, and i am going to go the OWC Mercury Elite Pro route for the enclosures and build my own drives - i am getting tense about loosing data and tho i have had no problems with LaCie, a lot of people have. as far as the drives themselves, i am thinking Seagate. (unless i should be thinking something else. anybody? anybody?)
 
well, my lacies (2 250 GB porsche models) have been very reliable. they've goofed a few times, but overall, just fine. BUT....they run HOT HOT HOT. mind you, these are a few years old, but man, i swear i could cook eggs on them.

i have a g-tech 'gdrive' fw400,800,usb 400 GB drive and it's AWESOME. very quiet once it's up and running. when starting, it sounds like a whiny jet engine starting, but once it boots onto the mac, it quiets right down. fanless operation and believe it or not, it doesn't get near as hot as the lacies. i do video work so it sometimes gets its a$$ kicked and it just works along...no problems.

although more expensive than lacie, i would vote for g-tech ANY DAY. they have a good warranty program (3 or 4 years), quiet operation, low heat and i think it's only not connected 1 time and i think that was b/c the cable was a bit loose. great product!
 
To reformat

net26 said:
i know this is off topic, but perhaps someone can shed some light on my situation...

i have an external drive (samsung spinpoint 8mb cache - VERY happy with it, mind you) connected via usb and cannot find a way to format it so that i can extract my dvds to that drive... it doesn't allow for filesizes over 1gb (I believe)... anyone know if this is even possible, and if it is, how should the drive be formated?

thanks,

n
Click to expand...

Use disk utility and highlight the mounted disk and click "erase". There should be an option to reformat it in Disk Utility. Haven't done that in a while so I don't remember the details.
 
net26 said:
i know this is off topic, but perhaps someone can shed some light on my situation...

i have an external drive (samsung spinpoint 8mb cache - VERY happy with it, mind you) connected via usb and cannot find a way to format it so that i can extract my dvds to that drive... it doesn't allow for filesizes over 1gb (I believe)... anyone know if this is even possible, and if it is, how should the drive be formated?

thanks,

n
Click to expand...

You can't use FAT32. I think that's about it.
 
gloss said:
You can't use FAT32. I think that's about it.
Click to expand...

its formated mac OSX (journaled) and i can't copy any files larger than 1gb to it... when formatting i checked what my mac HD is formatted to and used that... still doesn't work though...
 
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