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LaCie drive going down!
Okay, I have been known to be a supporter of LaCie drives. I’ve probably worked with 50 different drives of all flavors and sizes, and I’ve seen about 3 go down for good.
Well I just so happen to have a 1.6TB Bigger Disk Extreme with an HD feature on it that is starting to act up. I started noticing that I was getting noise in my render files, then FCP kept giving me errors when I tried exporting QT movies.
I noticed that even on the finder level, sometimes clips would open in QT, sometimes they would be grey, and sometimes they’d just display an error.
The drive is only a little more than half full, and it is about a year old.
So I went out and bought some G-Raid drives, and RAIDed them together so I have about 1TB of space. And I started transferring the files. About half way through, the drive began to act up again. I get errors when trying to copy files saying that Finder cannot open the file.
Since the hiccups seem to happen after the drive is on for a while – more than an hour – I think it may be a heat issue. The “quiet fan” sounds like a jet engine, and I’ll be the first to admit that my apartment doesn’t have AC!
So my question is – can I remove the SATA drives and put them in another enclosure? At my office we have SATA RAID towers and extra drive trays. If I pop open the LaCie and pop the drives into the RAID will they mount? Will it help? Or is it the drives themselves that are causing the problem.
I think I have about a week left in my warranty, but to be honest, I am worried that LaCie will loose the data.
What would you do? And don’t say “back-up the media” cause hind sight is always 40/40.
-Rick
P.S. If the drive does crap out completely – any one got a Panasonic AJ 1200A deck I could rent? The cheapest I know is HDstudios for $1200 a week.
Editor
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9 Replies
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Rick,
Try moving the drives to your other enclosure, they should fire up fine as the raid info is stored onboard the drives on ROM chips. But, its highly likely that one or more drives may be on the way out. On the other hand, maybe just a bit of cooling from the fan in the other enclosure could keep them going for a while. Heat, more than anything else, causes these suckers to die a premature death.
Good luck,
DRW -
[Rick Sebeck] “Since the hiccups seem to happen after the drive is on for a while – more than an hour – I think it may be a heat issue. The “quiet fan” sounds like a jet engine, and I’ll be the first to admit that my apartment doesn’t have AC!”
That’s a HUGE problem for hard drives. If your workspace is getting hotter than 73 degrees you’ll kill all your drives in a hurry. Heat more than any one thing will damage hard drives and the computers themselves. We run our offices at 73 maximum and every computer and large hard drive array has small fans blowing across the back.
[Rick Sebeck] “I think I have about a week left in my warranty, but to be honest, I am worried that LaCie will loose the data.”
I would contact LaCie tech support. That department is excellent and I’m sure they will be able to take care of you and get your media off. Mat Gasguy from LaCie is on these forums often and always encourages people to write to him directly. Mat@lacie.com
[Rick Sebeck] “P.S. If the drive does crap out completely – any one got a Panasonic AJ 1200A deck I could rent? The cheapest I know is HDstudios for $1200 a week.”
That’s a really good rate. Runs for about $1,800/week around here. Have you checked Bexel?
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Hello Rick,
I am sorry to hear that you had a problem with 1 LaCie drive.
The drives inside the Bigger Disk are PATA, not SATA. You would not be able to put the mechanisms in a SATA raid enclosure.Your drive is under warranty so I would sugged that you contact our tech support. With the fan and the aluminum enclosure, it is unlikely to be a heat issue, even without AC in the room.
Thank you.
Mat
mgasquy@lacie.com -
This may not help, but it’s close enough to your problem to suggest it. I just had problems with
a 4 drive ATA RAID, where I was getting the same problems as you’re describing. Tech Tool Pro
said the drives were fine (using the drive’s SMART function). I was able to rebuild the directory
for the RAID with Disk Warrior, but I was still getting errors, and when I opened the RAID onto the
desktop it would say there were tons of files in the folder, but they wouldn’t show up. All the files on the RAID
were video so I did a Find, looking for Type/Movies. I was able to copy all the files from the Find window
to another RAID. I did a surface scan of the individual RAID drives and it turned out that one drive had over 500 bad
blocks. I erased all the drives and wrote zeros to them (which can fix bad blocks), re-striped them and they’re working fine now.
Have you tried Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory? Have you used Tech Tool or Disk Utility to check
the drives?
Ed -
I’ll chime in here for a quick comment.
I have a couple of LaCie D2 drives at home and I’ve found that they are very heat sensitive. They tend to run hot normally but in the heat of summer they get very flaky indeed. Mine will give me a lot of problems after they have been on for an hour or so. I don’t have air conditioning in my house but I do have a window unit for my office. If I don’t run it this time of year, the drives become very unreliable as they heat up. As a normal condition I always run a small fan blowing across the drives. It helps disipate the heat and will usually smooth out the operation of these drives. You might want to try it in your situation. Can’t hurt anyway. This has been a hot summer up here in the upper midwest this year. Predicted temps here are in the 90’s for the next week. Before editing I HAVE to run the AC for an hour or so to cool the drives down before even turning the system on.I don’t know if this is a problem with external drives in general or with the LaCies specifically due to lack of cooling fans in the units. I just took delivery of a couple of FirmTek enclosures and will be transfering the data from the LaCies to the Firmtek raid over the weekend. Hopefully this will solve the dropped frame problems that occur when the LaCie drives overheat. We’ll see if the FirmTek units do better. Hopefully the run a little cooler. We’ll see.
I am firmly convinced that many times it is a heat issue with these LaCie drives. I will get dropped frame errors like crazy when the drives are hot. As soon as I get them cooled down, they run very well. It’s the heat. No doubt about it. New drives are cheaper than installing whole house AC I suppose. Normally it’s not that hot around here, but this year has been a hat one.
I guess it will be winter here soon enough and this won’t be an issue. Winter here in Wisconsin always means at least 8 months of good editing. I don’t even want to think about it. Brrrr… 🙂
Tom -
Ed,
Those bad blocks you “fixed” have a tendency to grow. They are more than often a sign of platter damage. Don’t consider the raid to be reliable until you can replace the bad drive, which you should do ASAP.
DRW
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I learned about heat issues when I got my very first computer. It was an Atari 800 with Percom floppy drives. I was having trouble with them and took them back to the dealer who couldn’t reproduce the problem no matter how hard he tried. But eventually it was narrowed down to a controller chip that was overheating.
So I built a simple cooling fan for it and that solved the problem.
For a brief time I ran a Media 100 system in a non-air conditioned room. When it got to 90 deg. F, I started having problems with the hard drives and crashing. I immediately stopped work, bought an AC unit, and the everything ran smoothly after that.
So while operating an AC unit will raise the cost of electricity substantially, it also ensures that all your hard work won’t go down the tubes due to hard drive failure. It’ll reduce the amount of dust floating into the room and into the equipment. It can also make a difference in fatigue factor as well.
Dean Sensui — http://www.HawaiiGoesFishing.com
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We keep everything in our machine room with AC on 24/7, and firewire drives fail all the time. We have gone through a lot of Lacie big disks, OWC’s, etc. In general, I have found that Firewire drives in general are just flakey… they are my worst nightmare…
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Here’s what I’ve gleaned from a year-and-a-half of editing hell, the hell of 4 other FCP editors, including those at a very large corporation and the advice of an expert who saved my life:
Lacie drives, especially the “porsche” design drives, can make editing with FCP pure torture. Plus Lacie support has been mean to my editing friends and dissed FCP, which is probably responsible for half of their business. I would like to know just how many people have experienced MAJOR FCP problems with LaCie’s. I would tell you the name of my new wonderful drive, but then you’d probably think this a commercial for them. My FCP problems evaporated completely when I ceased to use any material from my LaCie, porche-style, 250 GB drive. I regret the many months that this drive brought my work to a standstill over and over again. It was very hard to determine that the drive was responsible. So my advie to anyone using a LaCie drive who has FCP problems is… turn off your Lacie, create a new project on your main drive, capture some material on your main drive or a non-lacie drive, and see if the problems go away. If they do, i think you know where they might have come from.
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