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Seagate Buying LaCie for $186 Million

BinaryTim said:
Hitachi (the drive division) is actually owned by Western Digital now.

http://www.hgst.com/
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True, but that was about two months ago. Hitachi . . . to me. . . still makes some pretty reliable drives. As does Seagate and Western Digital I might add.

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Fact is, they are all pretty much the same. If they act up in the first few days/weeks then don't hesitate in sending it back right away. If not, then count on 3 years for your average consumer drive, and 5 years for a server/enterprise class drive. After that it's anyone's game.

Always . . . . ALWAYS back up your data because ALL fast spinning platters die eventually.

LaCie makes cases, so any issues that come about may actually be because of the case. I've had about 3 D2 series drives that "died" on me and I later found out that it was just the power brick that crapped out. I had already taken the drives apart by then and put them in new cases though.

In the end, I'll still buy whatever product gets my job done at the best price. Just got a LaCie TBolt to eSATA hub and it's keeping pace with my Drobo S loaded with Hitachi HDDs. My 2nd Gen Drobo still has some WD green powers in them, and I still have 3 other LaCie portables that've been kicking it for 5+ years.

I'd really like to see where the gobbling up of these drives/case makers is going.

mlmwalt said:
I really like my "rugged" LaCie drive. It's done the job for 3 years. Hopefully, Seagate doesn't mess them up for when I get my next one.
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Probably some of the best portable drives I've owned.
 
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mus0r said:
It was bad enough when they bought Maxtor and stole one of the other good manufacturers, now they're going to taint one of the best manufacturers of external drive cases.
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Good grief! Maxtor was a byword for unreliable as is LaCie.
 
Did LaCie actually make their own drives ? People here are talking as if LaCie was a HDD company, I always thought they only made enclosures and bought drives off the other driver makers to fill them.

Anyway, the HDD market is getting smaller and smaller. That's not good for competition and with the recent flooding, they have the perfect excuse to keep prices artificially high even though everything is pretty much back to normal.
 
The Man said:
Right now, Lacie uses different brands for their HDD (Samsung, Toshiba, etc.) I reckon it will be only Seagate after this. I like Lacie design, though sometimes they compromise on the build quality for the sake of design.
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There are only two mechanical hard drives right. Western Digital and Seagate. These two bought all of hard drive divisions from the companies you mentioned.

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KnightWRX said:
Did LaCie actually make their own drives ? People here are talking as if LaCie was a HDD company, I always thought they only made enclosures and bought drives off the other driver makers to fill them.

Anyway, the HDD market is getting smaller and smaller. That's not good for competition and with the recent flooding, they have the perfect excuse to keep prices artificially high even though everything is pretty much back to normal.
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Correct.
 
KnightWRX said:
I wonder when they will merge and competition will truly be dead ?
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They don't even need to. They can just set the prices between them and gouge away. I think they would not be allowed to merge due to anti-competition laws.
 
Always had good luck with LaCie. They're my go-to brand for external hard drives.
So far so good with Seagate too. I just hope that luck continues.

But really, SSDs are the future.
 
Digital Skunk said:
True, but that was about two months ago. Hitachi . . . to me. . . still makes some pretty reliable drives. As does Seagate and Western Digital I might add.

----------------------------------------------

Fact is, they are all pretty much the same. If they act up in the first few days/weeks then don't hesitate in sending it back right away. If not, then count on 3 years for your average consumer drive, and 5 years for a server/enterprise class drive. After that it's anyone's game.

Always . . . . ALWAYS back up your data because ALL fast spinning platters die eventually.

LaCie makes cases, so any issues that come about may actually be because of the case. I've had about 3 D2 series drives that "died" on me and I later found out that it was just the power brick that crapped out. I had already taken the drives apart by then and put them in new cases though.

In the end, I'll still buy whatever product gets my job done at the best price. Just got a LaCie TBolt to eSATA hub and it's keeping pace with my Drobo S loaded with Hitachi HDDs. My 2nd Gen Drobo still has some WB green powers in them, and I still have 3 other LaCie portables that've been kicking it for 5+ years.

I'd really like to see where the gobbling up of these drives/case makers is going.
Click to expand...
In my experience LaCie leans a bit toward power supply failures more often than I would like.

Hard drive makers are a dime a dozen and so are SSD vendors. Some times they will spit out a bad lot and on SSDs you get wonky controllers/firmware. OCZ made its name on Indilinx and Sandforce, yet they appear to be selling off anything based on Sandforce like it has the plague. A BSOD debacle tends to do that.

Given the "recent" flooding in Thailand, hard drive vendors have scaled back their warranties from the gracious 3/5 year split they had. Failure rates are not that high and some people might be wanting to finally get around to RMA'ing those drives sitting on the shelf yet still under warranty to make a quick buck.
 
Eidorian said:
In my experience LaCie leans a bit toward power supply failures more often than I would like.

Hard drive makers are a dime a dozen and so are SSD vendors. Some times they will spit out a bad lot and on SSDs you get wonky controllers/firmware. OCZ made its name on Indilinx and Sandforce, yet they appear to be selling off anything based on Sandforce like it has the plague. A BSOD debacle tends to do that.

Given the "recent" flooding in Thailand, hard drive vendors have scaled back their warranties from the gracious 3/5 year split they had. Failure rates are not that high and some people might be wanting to finally get around to RMA'ing those drives sitting on the shelf yet still under warranty to make a quick buck.
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Agreed. Even in their coveted 2Big that I had the power supply would just work, then not, then work, then not; then finally it just stopped working. I've a friend with a few D2s as well and they did the same thing. I eventually gave up on LaCie's power supplies. The rugged drives are still alive and well.

The flooding in Thailand hit much of the tech industry hard, and HDDs have really yet to recover IMHO. The prices have recently started to recover.
 
I like Seagate drives. Actually they are all I have ever used (except the piece of crap Toshiba in my mbp) I think that nothing but good can come from this. Two good companies combining to make an even better one.
 
wikus said:
Sounds like you never experienced a Maxtor hard drive....
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Dear lord I completely forgot about my old Maxtor Hard Drive. That thing was the loudest piece of **** I've ever owned, and I had a Honda Accord with broken exhaust as my first car. Luckily in the Dell BIOS you had the option of making it quieter, at a substantial performance loss.
 
Lacie's quality can only get better. We just threw out our Lacie graveyard the other day.
 
chairguru22 said:
Do you know how many people use Facebook? The advertising revenue is insane.
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That's exactly the problem - the advertising revenue is _not_ insane. To be worth $100 billion, Facebook would have to make about $6 billion _profit_ every year, not revenue. And they are nowhere near that, and right now it looks like they have no chance to get anywhere near that.
 
blackburn said:
I tossed an 1tb lacie external hard disk because it had lot's of bad sectors (hitachi hdd). I don't want to talk about seagate, the body count is too high (between 2010 and now I've tossed about 8~9 seagate hdds).

Still I've seen *every* brand of hdd fail. But lately hard drives are getting crapier (maybe due to the platter density increase). My old 100mb seagate hdd still runs like a champ.

So looks like instead of avoiding 2 brands, I will just avoid one! Nice :D
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I have lost a number of Seagate drives as of late too...all pre failure so no data lost. The nice thing is all were replaced by Seagate since they started failing within the 3 year warranty. For 9.95 they send you a drive as advanced replacement. I used CCC to move the data and used the return shipping packaging they sent the new drive in. Western Digital offers the same service and sometimes you get better drives as returns... Black for Green
 
Personally, I have never heard of LaCie. I have however heard of Seagate.

Merges can be a good thing for the consumers as well as the businesses.

What has been everyone's experience with LaCie? I have had no issues with Seagate products.
 
#Digital Skunk... am I understanding you correctly that you are successfully using a Lacie Thunderbolt Hub (eSata) with a Drobo S (5bay)? What firmware is your Drobo on? You are one of the very few people that claim the Lacie Hub is working with an S. Please give me some details... How is it comparing speed wise to the FW800 connection?.. I'm assuming you've used that interface at some point?

T40







Digital Skunk said:
True, but that was about two months ago. Hitachi . . . to me. . . still makes some pretty reliable drives. As does Seagate and Western Digital I might add.

----------------------------------------------

Fact is, they are all pretty much the same. If they act up in the first few days/weeks then don't hesitate in sending it back right away. If not, then count on 3 years for your average consumer drive, and 5 years for a server/enterprise class drive. After that it's anyone's game.

Always . . . . ALWAYS back up your data because ALL fast spinning platters die eventually.

LaCie makes cases, so any issues that come about may actually be because of the case. I've had about 3 D2 series drives that "died" on me and I later found out that it was just the power brick that crapped out. I had already taken the drives apart by then and put them in new cases though.

In the end, I'll still buy whatever product gets my job done at the best price. Just got a LaCie TBolt to eSATA hub and it's keeping pace with my Drobo S loaded with Hitachi HDDs. My 2nd Gen Drobo still has some WB green powers in them, and I still have 3 other LaCie portables that've been kicking it for 5+ years.

I'd really like to see where the gobbling up of these drives/case makers is going.



Probably some of the best portable drives I've owned.
Click to expand...
 
Track40 said:
#Digital Skunk... am I understanding you correctly that you are successfully using a Lacie Thunderbolt Hub (eSata) with a Drobo S (5bay)? What firmware is your Drobo on? You are one of the very few people that claim the Lacie Hub is working with an S. Please give me some details... How is it comparing speed wise to the FW800 connection?.. I'm assuming you've used that interface at some point?

T40
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Latest firmware on the Drobo S, the only downside to the hub and the S is that the drobo dashboard software doesn't seem to work correctly. I've been too busy to connect it over FW800. It mounts like a normal eSATA drive. I will plug it up to FW800 after my next render finishes and get the firmware for you.

It's fast, no exact numbers but it is a darn sight faster than any FW800 drive I've used to cut on, and a bit faster than it was connected to my Sonnet Tempo Express Card adaptor . . . the cheaper one. I will try to work up some numbers for you, instead of spitting out empirical evidence.
 
Cool. I'd be very interested in knowing anything you have to offer. I think I'm most concerned about stability... you crashing at all? Any other voodoo going on besides the latest drobo firmware? You running Lion?

I've got 2 - 12tb Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt arrays.. I'm averaging 550+ mb/sec reads and writes... which is bloody fast. All I've ever had Drobo connected to is via FW800, and its slow as a dog.
 
Track40 said:
Cool. I'd be very interested in knowing anything you have to offer. I think I'm most concerned about stability... you crashing at all? Any other voodoo going on besides the latest drobo firmware? You running Lion?

I've got 2 - 12tb Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt arrays.. I'm averaging 550+ mb/sec reads and writes... which is bloody fast. All I've ever had Drobo connected to is via FW800, and its slow as a dog.
Click to expand...

Nope no issues or crashing at all. I did have a small issue with my second hand Drobo 2nd Gen getting into that eternal boot sequence, but that was about 6 months ago.

Now, using AJA System Test I pulled around 35 MB/s write and 40 MB/s read on average using the Drobo 2nd Gen connected over FW80.

The Drobo S got 120 MB/s write and 120 MB/s read connected over eSATA connected via the LaCie hub. The interesting thing, is that the S peaked at times above 170 MB/s which is almost the max of SATA 1.0 which all of the drives in the S are by the way.

I was considering upgrading to some SATA 6.0 drives soon, but may opt for the 12TB Pegasus or some other TBolt drive.
 
120 is a big step up from (30/40)... if dashboard doesn't work, how do you safely shutdown the Drobo when you are done with it?
 
If you like there performance you get out of the Drobo overeat east's, your hair will be on fire once you hook up a Pegasus.
 
Track40 said:
If you like there performance you get out of the Drobo overeat east's, your hair will be on fire once you hook up a Pegasus.
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I could only imagine. Id rather not deal with anything other than a 6 bay, so I have to wait for the funds to be in the right place for my freelance business.

I actually never turn my S or 2nd gen off. When I do I just unmount them and turn the iMac off and they go to sleep fine.

Ideally I'd like to move to dual Pegasus R6 units and move the S to strictly backup, or trade it in for a FS which we have at the university.
 
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