Lacie 2big Thunderbolt – broken screw seals

I'd like to think if you called LaCie and asked them this question they'd give an authoritative answer, but in particular I'd hope they can correlate the serial number of the enclosure to the serial number of the drives inside it; make sure you got what you paid for.

According to the manual you void your warranty if the tamper seals are broken. But frankly, this isn't clear at all to me without inspection. From manual:

Warranty is voided if:

1. "The tamper seal on the LaCie 2big or an individual Drive Bay casing is broken.
2. "One or two of the hard disks have been removed and replaced by any hard disk other than a drive provided by LaCie. For drive removal/replacement process, see section 4, Removing and Installing Drives"


So in effect, those tempting hard drive bays are trojans for Lacie mark-up. Figures.


But anyways, if this is indeed the case about the seals, I would be worried that they exchanged the drives for cheaper ones and your warranty is void, like your worried about. THis would suck badly. I would think a return to sender is perhaps your only option. Unless Lacie makes an exception. But you know how that goes. Anyway, There are some cheap 3.5" drives that somebody might have stuck in there.

It's funny, as I just made a few posts earlier today in a related thread about this drive, as I bought a refurb (for a good price also). I was worried about the same thing. I will want to make sure 'refurb' means 'restore to factory', and not 'degrade to sell cheap'. I paid over $300 and can not live with anything other than Apple level refurbishment.

Anandtech has a review for this drive and you can see Seagate Barracudas they use as the drives. I can understand why Lacie would put seals on these as they (justifiably) don't want anyone complicating warranties and tech support. But it does seem kind of silly as it's not like your opening anything-it's already opened.

so the bottom line is: post the answer here after you call lacie, please.

nurivo said:

I received a Lacie 2big Thunderbolt today that I purchased off eBay. It works great. However when first inspecting it I found the seal stickers on both harddrive trays are broken.

I'm trying to figure out exactly how strict Lacie is about this kind of thing?

The seller has already offered to take it back, so that would be the safe route. But since it was a pretty good deal I wanted to make sure if anyone's had any experiences that might allow me to safely keep it.

Click to expand...

Hi,

In short, we'd question it. The reasoning is that even though you received the drive in this condition - there will be no way for us to prove it. Our repair department has no way of confirming when the seals were broken and since you'd be claiming ownership in a warranty situation we would have to assume you were responsible.

On the other hand, we aren't guaranteed to be strict about it. If you talk to us about it and discuss it with the technicians we will make a judgement call. Our techs are given the authority to waive certain types of warranty void situations and broken seals are one of them.

Finally, and potentially the real issue here, is that our warranty doesn't extend to second owner purchases. We have some authorized ebay vendors but most are going to be used or returned product to resellers who aren't being honest about the "new" condition.

If it were me, I'd call into our support line before you returned it and discuss the history of the disk with us. If our technicians can't find any evidence it was owned previously or returned to us at any point then I'd say you have very little to be worried about if you should ever need to talk to us about the warranty.

We can be reached at 503.844.4500 (USA) or http://www.lacie.com/mystuff

~mn, LaCie

Thanks for the comment, LaCie.

I would be concerned mostly if the internal drives had been swapped or replaced with other than original drives.

As you can see from other threads on this forum, there are many DIY users who have purchased various externals, replaced the original internal drives with SSDs or other HDD models for experimentation, and when testing is finished reassembled the drive for sale on ebay. It is one thing to restore to the original drives, but another to replace with similar capacity but different drives.

Unless your seller is willing to backup the warranty, I'd say return it.

Even if the internal drives are 7200 RPM Seagates like in the Anandtech review, you don't know if these are the original that LaCie provided, or might be of a different origin.

Once I purchased a "new" drive from a different vendor, and inside was a seemingly new drive. The seller had actually used white-out to paint over the refurbished marking on the serial number label. Pretty poor attempt to try to cheat the buyer.

Typically, when purchasing a used product, there is no guarantee that the manufacturer will honor the original purchase warranty. Kudos to LaCie if they do honor the warranty should a problem develop.