LaCie Hard drive Weirdness!

philbotphilbot
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I have always been a fan of LaCie external hard drives - I've used them for years (from when they were D2).



However I will NEVER buy another LaCie drive after the "mysterious" failure of ALL my drives within a few months!



Here's the story:



I have a few servers, Xserves, G5's, G4's etc, and use quite a few external drives for backup etc.



Recently we had a new XServe, and a few more G5's. Because of this I had cause to re-arrange the backup procedures which meant connecting the LaCie drives to other Macs.



Firstly, the two external 500GB drives I had on our XServe G4 wouldn't mount on my new Xserve G5.



Tried reformatting them, disk first aid, tech tool - everything.



They just kept spinning and flashing the blue light.



Fair enough, they are a couple of years old I replaced them with new ones.



Then, a week or so later I move my backup drive to another Mac. SAME STORY!



The drive wouldn't mount. Moved it back to my Mac - wouldn't mount!



Tried new firmware from LaCie, Tried OS9, 10.3, 10.4, Windows XP - everything!



The drives will not mount, cannot format them, cannot run disk first aid.



Today, I had a call from our Design dept after they've installed some new equipment and relocated a few drives.



Guess what???



They have 4 dead LaCie drives that won't mount anymore even after they've put them back on the original Macs.



Between us that's 7 dead drives all 1-3 years old, all dead after moving them from one Mac to another.





Has anyone else had similar problems?



Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    benzenebenzene Posts: 338member
    Wow. And I thought I was the only one...



    Yeah, pretty much the same story. It seemed like within the space of several months, all of my LaCie hardware (several drives and a burner) just up and died. I haven't bought LaCie hardware since.



    When I bought them, they had the reputation of being reliable. Oh well.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    mimacmimac Posts: 872member
    Man, that's pretty worrying! I bought an external LaCie 250GB D2 drive (which gets little use) because of the glowing reports here and elsewhere. Sounds like a job for LaCie technical support. Anyone with issues such as those given should contact LaCie and inform them as it may just be a software glitch.



    Try these links...



    http://www.lacie.com/support/



    http://www.lacie.com/
  • Reply 3 of 6
    idzillaidzilla Posts: 7member
    I've got 2 LaCie drives. The older one, a 160 Gig works great connected by firewire 400 and daisy chained with a few others. The newer drive, a 250 Gigger with FW800 but no 400 will not stay reliably mounted via firewire. I have to keep it plugged in via USB2. I sent it back for repair to the LaCie people and they found nothing wrong with it but the problem persists. I've tested on several computers all with the same results.

    Kinda sucks.

    Ah well, just more LaCie wierdness to add to the pile.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    messiahmessiah Posts: 1,689member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by idzilla


    I've got 2 LaCie drives. The older one, a 160 Gig works great connected by firewire 400 and daisy chained with a few others. The newer drive, a 250 Gigger with FW800 but no 400 will not stay reliably mounted via firewire. I have to keep it plugged in via USB2. I sent it back for repair to the LaCie people and they found nothing wrong with it but the problem persists. I've tested on several computers all with the same results.

    Kinda sucks.

    Ah well, just more LaCie wierdness to add to the pile.



    Oh man, that is worrying!



    I wanted to backup the contents of my server, but there was so much data that the only realistic way of doing it was to another hard drive.



    So I went out and bought two LaCie 500GB Big Disks, and configured them as a 1TB JBoD CDS. Each 500GB Big Disk is actually made up of two 250GB drive mechanisms, so in effect I'm running four drive mechanism together in order to achieve the 1TB.



    My understanding is that OS X's implementation of JBoD means that if you loose one drive you loose the data on them all. This is similar to RAID 0, but without the speed benefits that RAID 0 provides. At least with JBoD I can 'grow' the size of the CDS.



    I have used LaCie equipment for years and never had any problems whatsoever and this is why I trusted the Big Disks for this task. So thanks for the heads-up on the dodgy LaCie drives, I'm going to have to rethink my backup strategy!
  • Reply 5 of 6
    jumpyspiderjumpyspider Posts: 41member
    I got an external LaCie 250GB D2 about 18 months ago. I've beeen getting the click of death and mount faliures since January.



    Lacie tech support say it might be an issue with the power supply:



    "Thank you for contacting LaCie Technical Support. Try the drive with a

    different power adapter from another LaCie Drive (with the same power

    specifications). If the power adapter is found to be the problem, we can

    issue an RMA for it. Power adapters can be the cause of intermittent

    problems, as well as bad block/sector errors.



    Regards,



    Technical Support | LaCie UK Ltd"



    I'm gonna give this a try with the power supply from my dvd burner but from the posts in here, there's no telling when that will decide to "shoot the crow".



    All the best with your situation though. Personally, I'm beginning to foster a bit of a "never again" attitude with regards to Lacie.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    messiahmessiah Posts: 1,689member
    Having taking a Big Disk to bits, I can tell you that there are two 7200rpm disk mechanisms crammed in there and no fan.



    The drives get so hot that you can't physically pick them up – which is a bit of a worry!
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