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On Lacie drives in general
A previous post by Mr. Zelin mentioned that he no longer uses Lacie products, which prompts me to survey you dudes about it. I have had some pretty lousy experiences with recent Lacie purchases and am sorry to have recommended them to friends now. I suspect that most of my problems have come from 250’s or 500’s whose guts were Maxtor since I have some 6 year old Lacie 120gb drives that are still going strong. There’s a good forum on HDD’s that seems to indicate common problems with Maxtors that tinges my opinion negatively about them now.
My question is whether the Lacie flight has anything to do with issues other than lousy HDD quality control or whether G-Raid products [or something else] are all that much better? I know that Bob is very much pro-SATA, but I’m talking about external drives.
Comments please.
Steve Covello
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14 Replies
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I’ve probably recommended about 200 units over the past three years to both colleagues and Cow users and have never had a negative experience come back to me. A few users had bad units which LaCie either repaired or replaced right away.
I have several units that are going on four years old, I have the BDE’s and now an S2S and a new Two Big unit on the SATA side. Can’t say enough about how well they have worked out for me and the response I get from their tech support.
As I noted in that same thread you mentioned, the S2S SATA array has been running since January all day, every day cutting 8bit uncompressed SD with not a single hiccup. We just put the Two Big SATA array in there two weeks ago and it’s humming along as well.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Thx Walter. Are you concerned at all that using 500gb with Lacie’s RAID hardware makes data recovery a real pain in the ass as opposed to doing data recovery from a single volume? I guess if you are only using BDE’s for video media that if the drive goes down that you could just recapture on another drive. I had the misfortune of have 200gb of AfterEffects projects go down when an incorrect power supply was attached to it [sans bkp, of course — bad bad!!].
Also, someone once said to me that the reason why G-Raid drives don’t slow down as they fill up is because the two internal HDD’s “go in opposite directions” whereas the Lacie’s spin in the same direction. I can’t fathom this to be totally true since I would assume all HDD’s are standardized, unlike ceiling fans. I have seen at 3 BDE 500gb perform badly when they have gotten close to being 90% full.
steve
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[weevie833] “Also, someone once said to me that the reason why G-Raid drives don’t slow down as they fill up is because the two internal HDD’s “go in opposite directions” whereas the Lacie’s spin in the same direction.”
Actually what they mean is that the G-RAID’s borrow from their older siblings, Med
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Different people have different experiences with products. If Lacie products were terrible, Apple would not represent them in their stores. I see Lacie drives everywhere in Florida. I just have not had good experiences with them, with my client base. I know Roger Mabon, and G-Tech drives are teriffic, and I have had much better luck with G-Tech (and other companies) than Lacie.
SATA has better performance than FW800 – and this applies to ALL manufacturers of SATA products, including Lacie and G-Tech. I only use EXTERNAL SATA drives, and I use SATA because they COST LESS than more expensive Fibre and SCSI arrays from HUGE and Medea. To me, there is nothing like a HUGE drive array, but most people just don’t want to spend the money today, and want cheap – and SATA is that cheap solution.
Bob Zelin
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LaCie drives have become completely unstable, unreliable and LaCie has near unresponsive customer service. After waiting 4 days they tell me to do the usual — repair permissions etc. like I’m a complete idiot. I have shipped drives, power supplies & cables back and forth to no purpose. I regret ever buying any of them. I went with a Huge system and use SATA for off line.
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Just wanted to add my biased comments 🙂
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Mark, I am sorry that you had a bad experience with our products and tech support. They are usually very responsive, whether it’s with email or phone.Bob, you should definitely try our S2S and Two Big SATA II solutions. I am sure that you’d like them 🙂 Come check them out on our booth at NAB.
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Product reliability is the #1 priority. We have dedicated teams from R&D and QC working on this aspect from product conception to manufacturing. Obviously any customer with a defective product will be unhappy, and we always do our best to fix those problems. If you check forums from other storage manufacturers on the Cow, you will notice that some customers have problems with those solutions as well.Mat @ LaCie
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Thank you for piping up on this, Mr. Lacie. I only wish that Lacie would nix using Maxtor HDD’s.
What is the company policy in general on this [if you are liberty to divulge] since it is pretty clear that there are at least 5 reputable brands of HDD, all of which would presumably conform to ATA/IDE/SATA standards? And it seems that one or two of them have the hearts and minds of geeks over other brands, particularly Maxtor.
Have you seen a particular increase in problems with 250’s versus other smaller capacity drives? I know I have!
steve covello
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I purchased a LaCie triple interface 250g about 4 months ago. I’ve used it only half a dozen times and now it gets no power. The power supply has a light, but I’ve heard that even then it could be that the power supply needs to be higher watts. Either that or the firewire board burnt out.
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Just wanted to ad my baised comments as well 🙂
Having returned over 5 Lacies to your company due to failing drives, I cannot trust your product in a day to day edit session. Your 500gig drives did have a problem with heat and you have since added fans to them.
On one of the units I returned you swapped it out and the internal drives failed again. When I called you to have it repaired, you said it was out of warranty. You referenced the swapped out drive to the previous owner and I had no more warranty left even though I had the drive less than 6 months. What good is swapping out a drive if you cannot extend the warranty properly. Plus this was supposed to have been a fixed or new drive, not some refurbished old clunker. All you could say was, sorry it is out of warranty there is nothing I can do. That sure does not sound like “we always do our best to fix those problems.”
After that final straw with your drives, I built my own 1.2TB SATA raid and have been editing with it for over a year and a half without a single hic-up!!
When you come to NAB we can go out to the Nellis Firing range and watch what a Holland & Holland 450 Nitro express does when it hits my failed Lacie drives from 30 yards out 🙂 Oh wait, the drive case might need armor piercing rounds as it is so thick and does such a good job in holding in the heat.
Andy Edwards
AE Digital TV -
Hi Steve,
LaCie actually sources mechanisms from all 4 main brands. Considering our volume we always have at least 2 suppliers per capacity. Like computer manufacturers, we receive mechanism samples and qualify the mechs that match our requirements for performance, reliability and heat. Each manufacturer has good mechanisms. Depending on capacity/specs/interface we pick what we believe is best for our products and customers. Some storage companies are proud to use only “Brand X mechanisms” but realistically it does not make sense, except for the marketing hype. What if those mechanisms are not available? What if they happen to have a reliability problem on a large batch?You will always find people who prefer one brand to another, but we don’t sell mechanism X or Y in a Taiwanese enclosure. We sell a complete, tested solution, like computer manufacturers (nobody know what mechanism you get when you buy a G5 or a Dell).
250GB is the most popular capacity right now. There is clearly no reliability issue on 250GB mechanisms. While you may see some negative comments online, we shipped 750,000 external drives in the first part of our fiscal year. And the trend is now even higher. That’s a lot of happy customers 🙂
There are plenty of choices in the market place. Customers who don
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