Don't Buy LaCie

[Digital Skunk]

crack open a LaCie and inside you will find a crappy 3rd rate hard drive that they didn't make. I know this from experience.

They are over priced. All you have to do is grab yourself a western digital or even better a seagate and a good case. External drives are simple to put together and you'll have the top of the line hard drive for about 65% the price of a crap box LaCie.

LaCie is cheaper than G-Tech, whose the defacto video professional's standard. Many have cracked open their LaCie drives and have found Seagate Barracudas, Western Digital Caviars, and (back in the day) Maxtor's (who I do think is crappy)

Out of the four LaCie drives i have, two of them have Western Digital HDDs the 2Big has Seagates, and the old d2 has Maxtor.

All of my G-Techs have Hitachi's.... because that's all they use.

 

[LethalWolfe]

crack open a LaCie and inside you will find a crappy 3rd rate hard drive that they didn't make. I know this from experience.

Not to state the obvious but nobody makes HDDs except for the HDD makers (WD, Hitachi, Seagate, etc.,). LaCie, G-tech, CalDigit, etc., make enclosures, not HDDs.


Lethal

 

[smiles78]

crack open a LaCie and inside you will find a crappy 3rd rate hard drive that they didn't make. I know this from experience.

They are over priced. All you have to do is grab yourself a western digital or even better a seagate and a good case. External drives are simple to put together and you'll have the top of the line hard drive for about 65% the price of a crap box LaCie.

If anybody can tell me about a reasonably priced solution for
two 3TB standalone drives..
they shouldn't be more than 2bay arrays. ( idont wnat 8 drives humming on my desk..
All the ones I know can only take 2x 1TB drives max...
(it'll always just tell you in the small print)

Anybody seen a box for bigger ones? except for the LaCie 3TB?

 

[Digital Skunk]

If anybody can tell me about a reasonably priced solution for
two 3TB standalone drives..
they shouldn't be more than 2bay arrays. ( idont wnat 8 drives humming on my desk..
All the ones I know can only take 2x 1TB drives max...
(it'll always just tell you in the small print)

Anybody seen a box for bigger ones? except for the LaCie 3TB?

There's the G-Tech G-RAID3, which is the same concept of the LaCie 2big but non-configurable. Then there's just about any two bay enclosure with two 1.5TB drives inside.

Next stop is four bay and five bay enclosures.

 

[smiles78]

There's the G-Tech G-RAID3, which is the same concept of the LaCie 2big but non-configurable. Then there's just about any two bay enclosure with two 1.5TB drives inside.

Next stop is four bay and five bay enclosures.

thanks for the hint! will check it out...

 

[mpsrig]

My humble experience

Hello all -
Just thought I'd add my 2 cents about LaCie - The one and only 500gb drive I have from them is working fine, and has been for about a year now. It's on for about 8 hours a day. No problems.

 

[RedTomato]

Next stop is four bay and five bay enclosures.

I find it hard to understand the reasons for buying large enclosures like that. Once you get to that level, that price, to me the best thing is just to get a mini-tower or tower PC, and slap it full of HDDs and run it as a dedicated fileserver.

It's cheap, doesn't need to have the latest mobo or processor. It's easily upgradable, you can add extra network ports, cards, wifi, printer server, swap out drives, upgrade capacity, roll your own RAID, add further drives externally once it's full etc. It'll be able to serve at far higher speeds than enclosures which are well known for struggling to actually achieve gigabit network speeds.

After that, you're into rackmount territory.

 

[RedTomato]

...we wont be using them on a daily basis. We will back up all the episodes, and then they will sit on a shelf until they are needed. They'll only be plugged in when we back up to them and when we resurrect media from them.

New post as different topic. ISTR reading somewhere that drives tend to die if left unused too long - a year or two or more. The bearings seize up etc. Modern drives don't have bearings, but they can fail in other ways.

Just a heads up. I don't know how true this is. But circuits do tend to fail over time, even if left unused. Check out tin whiskers for one (of many) example of an unforeseen electrical failure mode.

 

[LethalWolfe]

I find it hard to understand the reasons for buying large enclosures like that. Once you get to that level, that price, to me the best thing is just to get a mini-tower or tower PC, and slap it full of HDDs and run it as a dedicated fileserver.

Not everyone wants to roll their own storage from the ground up and be their own tech support.


Lethal

 

[RedTomato]

Not everyone wants to roll their own storage from the ground up and be their own tech support.

Fair enough. PS Many thanks for your advice to me in another thread

 

[kdum8]

I don't know much about the merits of LaCie or otherwise, but these people are using LaCie Rugged drives on Mount Everest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-NeSzIRpTY&feature=channel_page

 

[jaysmith]

Our program at school told us we needed lacie drives, just because they knew they would be compatible with all the systems we use. I had 3 die on me in 2 years, and then I switched to G-drives, and they're amazing.

 

[kdum8]

Well despite the various negative opinions expressed here I just ordered the LaCie 500GB Rugged Hard Disk (FireWire 800).

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11085

We will see how I get on. Frankly I don't expect any problems but I will post here if I encounter any.

 

[joaoferro37]

Not to state the obvious but nobody makes HDDs except for the HDD makers (WD, Hitachi, Seagate, etc.,). LaCie, G-tech, CalDigit, etc.
, make enclosures, not HDDs.
Lethal

They don't make enclosures, they have factories in China make the enclosures.
Theses companies maybe design the look of the enclosures and do marketing here in the States.

Caldigit HDPro
http://www.caldigit.com/ImageBank/HDPro2U_01.png

is as same as Maxtronic

http://www.maxtronic.com.tw/index.php/pcietosataii-raidproductsmenu/sa-4378s-raidproductsmenu-130


=================
http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-safe.cfm

is as same as Stardom SR3610-2S-WBC

http://www.stardom.com.tw/sohoraid_feature.htm

 

[UltraNEO*]

So in the past we have had discussions about LaCie drives. Despite some fellow members warning about their drives, I bought one. The drive enclosure is sold as "hot swappable". However, they won't sell you the drive trays alone. So when you fill up your RAID you have to buy overpriced drives from them. In fact, removing the old drives from the trays voids their warranty.

I don't think this is normal, as I am always free to buy whatever hard drives I want with other hot swappable systems. If I am wrong, let me know. Otherwise, I stand by not recommending LaCie to anyone.

Ain't had any issues with LaCie drives or their customer service. Infact from my experience, they're been really good! Just wish they choose another mechanism instead of DeathStars. Though in their Little Big Drive they did use WD's - was kinda impressed.

 

[iPhoneNYC]

I go thru alot of drives with various FCP projects. I was using gRaids for a while but their switches went bad and the LaCies turned out to be more reliable. Drives are cheap compared to all the effort and expense of shooting. So I digitize and back-up. One the project is over one drive is kept and one is re-used. But I have noticed that over time all drives seem to have problems so don't expect a drive sitting of the shelf for years to always be there for you.

 

[Don Saar]

Don't buy La Cie monitors

I have a 3+ year, out of warranty, LaCie Photon 19 Vision monitor which has screen streaking and visual distortions. After much contact with these people out in Oregon, LaCie neither provides repair service nor do they indicated from where any replacement part(s) may be obtained! Therefore, do not buy LaCie monitors. Period. End of this discussion. Don Saar, drdonzi@crocker.com

 

[niuniu]

I have a 1TB Neil Poulton LaCie.. gf got it for my bday pressie last Sept.. it's great so far..

don't know anything about swappable stuff though, so maybe this is redundant..

 

[LeonO]

Beware of LaCie factory warranty claim!

Something I ran into when asking for warranty from LaCie :

Warranty is valid from LaCie’s date of original shipment. So even if you buy an item from an authorised reseller, the warrantyperiod starts on the date LaCie shipped it to the reseller/dealer.

In my case LaCie does not want to repair my drive, even though I bought it less than two years ago, because they claim they shipped it out much earlier!

 

[Jerkfish]

I've only used a handful of LaCies when editing shorts for fellow classmates, but every single time I've seen first-hand just how low quality their drives are.

The first one has a super sensitive plug. I'm talking a slight nudge and it would disconnect. Tried it on multiple computers so it wasn't on the computers end, and we even tried multiple cables. It had to be the plug on the drives end.

The second one just always took forever to be recognized by any computer. I'm talking 5+ minutes most times.

Third one had a crappy power brick. Started making this ticking noise just a few months in and then just outright died. First power brick I've even seen fail in my life.

In the three years or so I've had my two Western Digital externals (500gb and 300gb, which still run perfectly) I've seen three LaCies come and go.

 

[auero]

My experience with LaCie was hell. I purchased a 500GB drive I had connected to my G5 at the time at all times via firewire 800. I eventually started shutting down my computer and noticed my drive stopped turning on. It would flicker on but it wouldn't mount and I wouldn't hear the drive clicking.

After talking to LaCie they replaced the PSU cable and it fixed it till it happened two more times! The drive ticks a lot now and also grinds so I just use it as a dump for unimportant temporary files. I wouldn't buy another drive again from them after reading around that this is something that frequently happens.

They're SOLID drives and the enclosure was great, speed, support but there was a design flaw somewhere and I won't risk losing my data by purchasing one again.

 

[thebigo]

I hey put a little sticky void sticker over one hard drive tray screw. This we all know is not legal. It is like a computer company putting a void sticker on the case, so you can't replace your own hard drive or video card without voiding their warranty.

Apple does this. It's entirely legal. Please read the EULA before accepting it.

 

[mperkins37]

I have had a few & I can say that my experience was less than stellar.
got about 2 years before it died. wife got one for her claassroom in Nov last year & It clicks & grinds already,
Told her to buy an enclosure & a seagate, but what do I know......

 

[dfs]

LaCie

A while ago I bought a LaCie Ethernet drive which I used for networked backups. All went well until we had a thunderstorm which managed, I'm pretty sure, to scramble the directory. The maintenance software that came with the disk was not able to reformat it, and the LaCie tech support was obviously clueless (and just as obviously not particularly interested in helping me solve my problem). So now I'm the proud owner of a brick. There are a couple of lessons to be learned from my experience. First, if you are shopping for a networked h. d. you need to pay attention to the quality of the maintenance/repair software that comes with it, since you can't fall back on utilities like Disk Repair you use for a normal h. d. And I wish the people who write reviews of networked disks would grasp this, they almost always don't, which makes purchasing one of these units a good deal harder than it should be. Second, if you think you might ever need tech support help, you had better shop for another brand, because, to be blunt about it, theirs is pretty godawful.

 

[Mr.Bullitt]

Hi guys!


Sorry to awaken this thread, but it had me worried as I was thinking of buying one of the 2 HD RAID solutions from Lacie.

Now I am looking at empty OWC enclosures - anyone have experience with them???