Lacie Big Drive 1TB crashes

[Rotary8]

This drive likes to sleep a lot when inactive (probably like most drives) and its normal. The drive is a year old and lately whenever I wake it up to access a file it spools then I get that spinning beachball of death.

I bought a my book to back up the lacie drive (9 hours for 600 gigs) then formatted the sucker. Did a zero data erase. The drive goes to sleep a few minutes later and when I try to wake it up my finder crashes again.

Is the drive on its' way out? I don't remember where I placed my receipt or the warranty card so I'm thinking $300 is about to go to waste >.<

If there's a solution to how to restore or fix it I am open to suggestions.

thanks in advanced,

 

[Rotary8]

after much going back and forth with the tech he said my drive is on its way out. I'm one month beyond my warranty period and there's nothing they can do.

I should've listened to the IT folks at my job when they said Lacie makes crap HDs. Now I know for a fact that it's a total piece of expensive crap.

My old maxtor 250gb external from 5 years ago is still running very well. I also went out and bought a western digital mybook as a replacement since, I'm not going to shell out another $300 for a lacie drive.

To give you an idea of the drives' usage, I mainly backup my macbook and store tons of raw image files on it. I would be incredibly pissed if the drive just instantly died. At least it gave me time to back up the entire thing.

RIP Lacie garbage. Buyer beware.

 

[scaredpoet]

I have a feeling the frequent spin ups/spin downs were a huge contributor to the short life of this drive. I set my desktops to not spin down the disks, unless powering down or going to sleep. On a desktop there's little point, especially since past experience seems to show that hard drives kept spinning tend to enjoy long lives.

 

[Rotary8]

I have a feeling the frequent spin ups/spin downs were a huge contributor to the short life of this drive. I set my desktops to not spin down the disks, unless powering down or going to sleep. On a desktop there's little point, especially since past experience seems to show that hard drives kept spinning tend to enjoy long lives.

The tech said that's the nature of these drives. No way to keep it from spinning down to sleep mode except, I play my mp3's on a continuous loop with the volume off.

 

[GoCubsGo]

after much going back and forth with the tech he said my drive is on its way out. I'm one month beyond my warranty period and there's nothing they can do.
RIP Lacie garbage. Buyer beware.

Funny you should say that. I was 11 months into my 1 year warranty and they said they wouldn't cover the drive "nearly failing" as it hadn't failed.
I'll probably never buy another Lacie as a result. Now, it seems to work ok, but I hardly use it for much and I keep a backup of it elsewhere for when it does fail...or nearly fail again.

Not a fan of Lacie CS.

 

[Cave Man]

I had a similar experience with a WD internal drive. Started having problems at 11 months and I reported it. They had me do a disk repair, reformat, blah, blah, blah. It went out two months later and WD would not replace it. I'm done with WD - **** company if you ask me. (It's the second WD drive I've had fail. None of my Seagate (3) or Samsung (4) drives have failed.) I'd be curious to know what drive Lacie had put inside their enclosure - a WD by chance?

 

[merl1n]

I don't like LaCie drives either. Their warranty (12 months) period bites compared to other manufacturers, their external power supplies fail readily, and their controller boards fail frequently. I had at least 6 of their drives and they all starting failing. Luckily I have all of my large drives "mirrored" (RAID 1) so I didn't lose any data.

LaCie also won't even repair one of their drives that are out of warranty even if you offer to pay for the repair.

I now use OWC drives exclusively. Their warranties on their case mechanisms are two years and the drives inside range from 3 - 5 years on their warranties. The drives are extremely reliable (I have 10 of the Aluminum enclosures and 9 Mercury "On The Go" drives) and their customer and tech support are excellent as well as their prices.

 

[scaredpoet]

The tech said that's the nature of these drives. No way to keep it from spinning down to sleep mode except, I play my mp3's on a continuous loop with the volume off.

Wow, that's ridiculous!

I've always found LaCie's products to be overpriced, but I had assumed quality was included with the premium. Clearly not. For your next 1TB drive, you're probably better off stuffing one of these into one of these, as I've done.

And FWIW, not all external hard drives spin down when inactive. I really don't know why people think spinning down is a good idea. If I want my drive spun down, I'll eject it and turn it off.

 

[Dahl]

Funny, I have had a LaCie drive running non stop for years without problems.

I have heard really bad stories about ALL the cheaper drives. None of them are perfect and WD should be among the worst.

If you want a good drive, spend the $ and get something from http://www.caldigit.com/.
They are used by "pros", cost more, but should be a lot better.
I just got a good deal on a large RAID from LaCie, if it fails, I will try CalDigit.