External hard drive

[roadkill401]

When i bought my 2014 iMac 5k, I got an external Lacie D2 3TB thunderbolt drive to work with the mac. As my iMac only has a 512gb SSD, I use the external drive for storage, scratch disk, overflow. Well, recently the Lacie has been acting up and today i went to use my iMac to find it in an off state. Turned it on to be welcomed with a note that DiskUtility could not recover Lacie. Seems that the HFS+ partition is toast. I used DiskDrill to recover most of the data off the drive that i transfered to my backup disk.

So it might be the wrong forum to ask in, but i am lost as to where to ask. I have pulled the Lacie apart and pulled the old Seagate 3tb drive out. My thought is that if the drive will corrupt, then it might be that the drive itself is failing. I didn't notice any reported errors on S.M.A.R.T but i dont put much faith in that. I figured i'd just replade the drive with another. I do like having the drive on Thunderbolt as I feel it works faster and more reliable than USB.

Has anyone replaced a drive on a Lacie D2 with one of the more modern larger drives? Will it work with say an 8tb drive?

 

[chscag]

I can't answer that question, but have you considered that it's possible the LaCie enclosure may be the problem? Replacing the Seagate is probably a good idea but also consider that the enclosure may be the source of the trouble.

 

[Stephen.R]

Do you know the specific model/series of d2 it is? They’ve sold a lot of things called “d2” over the years.

It’s probably safe to upgrade to whatever the maximum they sold them with when new, but beyond that you may face issues of the controller in the case not supporting larger drives.
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That’s not to say it won’t work, but it depends if you’re willing to be stuck with an 8tb drive that won’t work (properly) in the case you have.

another option (to make use of the case) might be a 2.5” SSD - it’ll make better use of the TB connection and is unlikely to be larger than the controller supports (largest I’ve seen is 4TB and they’re very pricey).

 

[Fishrrman]

My advice, take it for what you paid for it:

Since you were able to get the data off of the drive, that's the most important thing.

It could be the drive itself (the actual "hard drive"), or it could be the enclosure that houses the drive.

I'd just replace them both.
But...

This time you might consider buying in the 2.5" form factor.
That could be an SSD (2tb is probably the limit for reasonably-priced) or perhaps a "bare" platter-based HDD.

For platter-based drives:
I recommend that you DO NOT buy either WD or Seagate.
Instead, consider Toshiba or Hitachi (HTSC?).

You can buy a USB3, 2.5" enclosure for about $10.
Some of them don't even use screws -- just drop the drive in and snap the cover on.

 

[roadkill401]

Well. it has taken me about 3 days to finally get all the data off of this thing as even with the hard drive removed from the Lacie, it would crash every hour or so.

I believe now that the Lacie D2 controller is fried. I found an old 1tb drive that I put into the case and it does start up but shows the same symptoms as the 3tb seagate.. the front big blue light has a constant fast flash. I did finally find the led codes and that indicates that the drive is either starting and shutting down. As the drive sits in that mode, I think the controller is doing something wrong and it might have trashed the drive.

After getting all the data off the drive, I tried to reformat the Seagate drive but the mac keeps coming up with a message that the drive has errors. So it's trashed.

It's a pitty as getting TB2 drive enclosuers are dificult not and resulting in EXPENSIVE. I did find an old USB3 case from 6-7 years ago, and have put the 1TB drive into that and called it SCRATCH. Will have to work with that until I find something better. I have a ThunderBay Mini that I use with SSD drives but I don't want to use an SSD for a scratch disk. the constant writes will wear out the drive in short time. I might just need to consider if there are any good 2.5" laptop style hard drives that are large enough. I can fit one of those in the Thunderbay Mini.

 

[kohlson]

the constant writes will wear out the drive in short time.

Just curious - how much data is being written to scratch? There was a test several year ago where SSD drives were stress tested. IIRC, nearly all went well beyond 1PB, which is to say almost 3 years of writing one thousand gigabytes, every day.

 

[Stephen.R]

If it’s “scratch” in the typical sense I’d say that even if the drive will have a much shorter life, the speed benefit of even a SATA SSD (vs mechanical) would outweigh the cost of a replacement one, even if you had to replace it every 12 months.