La Cie Big disk extreme

[Walter Biscardi]

glad to see they replaced the units for you.

We have two BDE’s running over a year and a half now with no issues from either unit.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
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[Dave Mac]

Well, I just had a 500 GB (dual 250 GB) Big Disk Extreme fail on me after 13 months (out of warranty). In over 20 years of using computers, I have never had anything die completely on me like this. I have replace hard drives when they became noisy, but never had a complete unit (external or internal) die like this. I guess I’ve been rather fortunate.

From other’s reports, it seems like the power brick (supply/transformer) or the FW bridge go bad much more often than a drive failure occurs. I am waiting for an new case from fwdepot.com to see if the two drives will continue to work (didn’t have the unit in active use, so there was no data lost).

The problem with the controller board/bridgeset going bad on these multiple drive LaCie units is that they are RAID-ed and you will lose data, even if the bare drives inside are still good.

I have had about a 50% failure rate with the d2 variants of the LaCie external drives. Never had a problem with any other, even “no name” brands. It may be that LaCie’s design or quality of the power supplies or controller boards weren’t quite as robust as they should have been, or there wear issues in manufacturing. I did buy all of my LaCie drives within a couple months of each other, so that could explain the failures if they were design-related or manufacturing-related, or both.

The worst part is the circuitboard/controller may be about the cheapest part of the entire unit… it sucks that it failed (in my current case).

[Dave Mac]

For the sake of reference for other LaCie users, or potential buyers, it may be that the 2-drive variants of the d2 case design are more prone to heat-related failure because they don’t have fans. Single-drive units may be able to adequately dissipate heat via the case. The units larger than the Big Disk Extreme units seem to have fans (I know a bunch of people with these units). The fans tend to be noisy, but I haven’t heard of any failures with those units yet.

[Mat @ lacie]

Just wanted to point out that some models of Big Disk Extreme (1TB for example) have a variable speed fan, in addition to a heat dissipating aluminum chassis and thermal foam. Other models provide sufficent heat dissipation. We run extreme tests on those products to make sure that they can handle a heavy workload daily.

Bigger Disk, Two Big SATA II and Biggest Disk (F800, S1S, S2S) also have fan(s).

With less than 3% return rate (including between 69 and 72% of No Problem Found products) we maintain a very high reliability rate.

Hope this helps.
Mat