Penman said:
You're right - it's dogma. I do a lot with movie studios who use drives for critical stuff (mostly video and graphics) LaCie are all over and very well respected. Hollywood goes to the Apple store and buys LaCie - that's one industry that's happy with them. I'd file such broad statements along with 'Windows crashes all the time' and 'Steve Jobs makes no mistakes' - speculative garbage.
Anecdotal evidence isn't. I bought a Mac that was DOA and have just lost a pixel on my new PB. Does that mean Apples are crappy? No. It's bad luck and statistically irrelevant. People can offer opinions but not jusgements that stand up to scrutiny unless they have access to a huge volume of units and have taken care to note things. Forgive me being a pedant but I hate unscientific bias. People who've had poor experiences with a product often blame the brand when they shouldn't. We all know people who swear off Fords, Macs, PC's, Sushi and other things because at one point things went badly for them or a friend. If you can find a piece of hardware that no-one's got a bad thing to say about you're not looking hard enough.
As you might guess - I have 3 LaCie's (a CDRW and 2 500Gb FW800 externals). They run great and I've not had any problems.
My experience with Lacie is not "unscientific"- what is more scientific than personal experience- and repetitive personal experience at that (two crappy drives)? Lacie makes some very nice products (monitors), but their hard drives are hit or miss- read the Digidesign forums, apple forums, even this site etc. I have never heard one bad thing about OWC drives or Storcase products...NOT ONE! I've heard many bad things about Lacies as well as having bad experiences with them myself. Go figure.
Of course most rational people don't think that a brand name sucks because a couple people rant on a forum about it cause they lost their wedding photos, but when you come across large numbers of people who bad mouth a product, and professionals at that (pro audio, video, etc.) there's usually a reason for that. Regardless of your own experience with Lacie, there are obviously many people who haven't had good experiences with them- as "godfather" said, even though he recommended Lacie, "I've heard not so many positive reactions about LaCie".
I wish the Lacie's were reliable- they look great, are very small, and the case is quite nice, but they did not hold up. They use cheap internal components like Maxtor HD's, they can be noisy (as I said before- hit or miss- depends on which drive you get inside), and the warranty is not great.
To the original poster...there are many drives out there that will do the trick. Choose based on what YOU want to buy. For low price FW800, as I stated before- I recommend OWC enclosures with either Seagate, IBM/Hitachi, or western digital caviar drives, (with 8MB cache). If you want to spend the cash, get a FW800 storcase silo with dual data carriers. I've also heard that the EZquest drives are nice, but I don't know anyone that has them.
I do not recommend Lacie's from PERSONAL experience- both my own and the experiences of my friends. If you want to give your opinion, "penman", then do as you will, but don't come off like mine is "speculative garbage". I simply stated what I think and what I've heard- the original poster can make up his own mind whether to trust what people say or not.
p.s. I never said everyone in the industry hates Lacie drives- I said everyone I KNOW in the industry doesn't like them, except for my friend Willie who did commercials for Sprite and such and he loves them.
