LaCie Porsche 500GB - Wolf in sheep's clothing?

[waynesun]

I know a bunch of terrible things have been said about this 500GB HDD.. after a bunch of solid reviews on Amazon and NewEgg, I decided to spring for LaCie's model to award myself with some beefy space.

My journey was a fairy tale until I reached MacRumors to search up ways to maintain this drive. Now, i'm a bit worried as to whether I threw 100.00 at a great doorstop or a worthwhile investment.

It's read as a "Seagate ST3500830A USB Device".. I assume that the HDD inside is actually a Seagate model (contrary to the Maxtors and Samsungs that people have been experiencing external hell with). I've read that external HDDs with Seagate drives are some of the most reliable, yet i'm also seeing the "caveat emptor" reviews of LaCie's external HDDs in general.

Which to believe?! Ah, this is driving me crazy!

 

[ntrigue]

I've had mine since Leopard and it works brilliantly

I know that a major technique is to unplug from power for a few hours.

 

[atthecross]

mine has been powered on since June 2007 and has not had a problem.

When Leopard came out, I switched it to be the Time Machine drive and it has not had an issue.

 

[Consultant]

This is for all harddrives in general.

One thing that I found that helps is that after you eject any external hard drives, DO NOT turn it off immediately, as the harddrives will take a few seconds to spin down.

Instead, after eject, wait 5-10 seconds for the external to spin down before switching it off.

Also watch for excess heat, you also want externals to be on a UPS to prevent power surge and lost of power from messing it up.

 

[Makosuke]

Most of my experience with LaCie external hard drives dates back to the SCSI era, but I do have one of their newer ones at work and it seems to be reasonably nice.

What I've read in a couple of places is that most (almost all?) of the problems people are having with LaCie drives is that LaCie is using cheap power supplies for them, and those are causing flakey behavior. That might explain the discrepancy between the good and bad experiences--depends if you got lucky on the power brick or not.

 

[hodgjy]

My first LaCie was (it's still alive, but serves as an archive for emergency restores) a great drive. The disk itself was very nice--it was a Western Digital. The only problems I've ever had with it are it's not the best at mounting in OS X. It was downright terrible in Panther. It was much better in Tiger and about the same in Leopard. Whenever it failed to mount, the only solution was turn it off, unplug it for a few seconds, and then start over. I'm convinced it is the chipset because it's not an Oxford set. All my other drives use the Oxford 911 and they mount flawlessly every time. I think you have to take in account the chipset as well as the disk itself when buying externals. Find the combo that you like. I limit myself to Oxford chipsets and Seagate disks.