Urgent Problem with LaCie Little Big Disk 200GB

[HS68]

Upgrading LBD 320GB

Yup.. You can!
Upgrading the drives will work just fine! Make sure you buy PATA (E-IDE) drives and not the newer SATA units, installing a pair of WD250's will give you about 460 to 470Gb of usable space, not bad for a mobile unit that's bus powered!!

Nope, no software is required...
Just use the OSX disk utility to format the unit.. the RAID 0 will be created automatically.

Thanks for the great information on this thread. I have been using several LaCie Drives (a Big Disk 500GB-triple, two LBD 320GB drives, two 500GB Porsche desktop USB drives, and some of the smaller Porsche FW400/USB drives) over the years and have found them really solid, even in extreme conditions. I used two 320GB LBD drives during my time in Afghanistan to hold my iTunes collection and my Aperture library. I always back things up though on a regular basis, as I go by the old adage that 'if data isn't in at least two places, it doesn't exist'.

I am now finding that I am running out of space on my LBD 320GB drive that I use to store my Aperture Library. I back up a vault every day or so to my 1st Gen Drobo (until I can afford the new on with FW800). So, in the meantime, I thought of upgrading my LBD to 500GB or 640GB.

Anyway, I guess my question is why use the PATA-EIDE drives? Aren't the drives in there now SATA? I have 2 x 160GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 drives in there, but I am not sure what type they are (SATA or PATA). How do you tell?

 

[pooryou]

I just had a 1TB LaCie Big Disk Extreme completely die on me. Won't mount on any computer thru FW, USB, or FW800. Disk Utility and Disk Warrior cannot even see it, yet the LaCie Update Utility sees it and is willing to install the firmware update, which does nothing. If I run the updater again it just updates it again.

Pretty frustrating. I don't even need the data it was just backups (yeah great idea there...NOT) I just want to be able to use the drive as it was expensive. Although at this point I don't think I trust it anyway...

This will be my last LaCie product.

Got a 1TB G-Tech G-Drive and it also died, not recognized by any computer at all, no matter what.

In both of these cases I don't actually think the drive itself is dead, you can hear it trying to spin up.
But no computer (mac PC anything) will recognize either of them as a firewire device.

I'm pretty much going to have to give up on external FireWire drives as they are just way too unreliable in my recent experience.