LaCie Disaster

[Walter Biscardi]

[Mark brinster] “But don’t try to dismiss this issue because you went out and bought a label maker and labeled your adapters, cables etc. ok?”

Again, this particular issue is a USER ISSUE. He connected the wrong cables to the wrong drives. This is in no way the fault of LaCie. How hard is it to label your cables? I have about 50 or 60 cables in the back of my rack unit, I have no idea what is what without labels. Even just standard power cords, all of them have a label on it so I don’t accidentally pull the wrong cable.

[Mark brinster] ”
The plain fact of the matter is that I and many other LaCie customers who purchased these drives are out several hundred bucks for each drive and are not happy about it. You want to argue about customer satisfaction? Fine. You are a happy customer. I am not.”

And have you had this exact issue? have you connected the wrong cable to your drive and had this exact issue? Not that I can recall. Drives spinning down have nothing to do with a power cable. Connecting the wrong power cable to a drive has nothing to do with LaCie.

Again, I see the same few people in these forums every time the name “LaCie” shows up in a thread. I’m not saying they don’t have problems, I’ve had some hiccups with my drives and I’ve had complete failures from my Med

[Mat @ lacie]

Sean – I am sorry I responded to Mark earlier. My suggestion about calling Tech Support was for you.

Mark – Any customer with a defective product is not a happy customer. I am not doubting your feedback regarding tech support. Sometimes phone stats don’t reflect personnal experiences. Let me know if I can help.

Our tech support has no problem taking care of customers who have power supply issues, whether the drive is under warranty or not. In Sean’s case, it seemed that the boards might be fried so it’s the reason why I wrote “if your drives are under warranty”.

I did the google search that you suggested but I need to point out that google list all the web pages that contain the words LaCie – Big – Disk – Spin – Down – Issues. Except that those words don’t have to be in the same sentence so most of those pages are not about actual spin down issues with our products.

In regards to my participation to those forums. It was originally because of my personnal interest for video editing. It turned out that sometimes I could help some people with answers about LaCie drives. The Cow is nice enough to let me post. Not a big hidden agenda in the end. I like talking with customers, whether they have good or bad feedback.

It’s because we care about our customers that we have been in business for 17 years and shipped more than 2.5M drives last year. We keep working hard to make good products at a good price. Feel free to email me at mgasquy@lacie.com. I’d be happy to help you out if I can.

Thanks.
Mat

[Walter Biscardi]

[Mat @ LaCie] “It’s because we care about our customers that we have been in business for 17 years and shipped more than 2.5M drives last year. We keep working hard to make good products at a good price. Feel free to email me at mgasquy@lacie.com. I’d be happy to help you out if I can.”

And that is why Mat is one of the classiest guys in the business. He’s willing to talk to you directly and see what can be done to recitify the situation.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Sean Oneil]

[walter biscardi] “Since you knew you had multiple units with similar power cords, it’s up to you to distinguish between them so this type of thing doesn’t happen.”

I knew. The person who plugged it in did not know. That person’s job is to be an editor, not to keep track of AC adapters. Regardless I never thought it could fry the thing. I trusted LaCie to have the kind of foresight needed to prevent their customers from making potential grave mistakes. Such as using different connectors for plugs that will break other products of theirs. Something like this could happen to anyone with LaCie products. Yourself included. You could easily have an intern or someone make this mistake, labeled or not. I’m sure you’d yell and scream and fire the person while proclaiming your love for LaCie. But I don’t work that way. Yes, it is user error. My error. But the error was not because I didn’t go get a label maker a Staples. It’s because I purchased LaCie products.

Sean

[Sean Oneil]

[walter biscardi] “Again, this particular issue is a USER ISSUE. He connected the wrong cables to the wrong drives. This is in no way the fault of LaCie. How hard is it to label your cables? I have about 50 or 60 cables in the back of my rack unit, I have no idea what is what without labels. Even just standard power cords, all of them have a label on it so I don’t accidentally pull the wrong cable.”

Whatever your reasons for being an apologist, I’ll leave you to them. Nothing like this has ever happened to anyone in my studio with any other product. I don’t just mean disk drives. I mean anything. Radios, portable CD players, you name it. If it’s the wrong plug, 99 out of 100 times it won’t fit. And even if it does fit it won’t break the thing. There are supposed to be electronics in the drive that will prevent this kind of thing. There are these things called fuses. It shouldn’t have happened. End of story.

Sean

[Sean Oneil]

[Sean ONeil] “It’s because I purchased LaCie products.”

Being a bit harsh, I’d like to retract this particular statement. But I’m still very dissapointed.

Sean

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Sean ONeil] I trusted LaCie to have the kind of foresight needed to prevent their customers from making potential grave mistakes.

This is really the crux of the issue.

It’s one thing for a user to not RTFM for a particular product, and then complain that they can’t figure out how to use it. It’s quite another to expect them to be fully aware of the potentially irreversable electrical damage that can be caused by plugging in an adapter for a similar product from the same manufacturer, *and* which are physically compatible with each other. That’s just BAD DESIGN on the manufacturer’s part, and it’s really not Sean’s fault for making the mistake that he did. At the very least, the enclosure should have been designed so that the power circuitry of the enclosure itself fries *itself* before it ever has a chance to torch the drive electronics.

Read the (wonderful) book by Don Norman, “The Design of Everyday Things“, if you’re not convinced that it’s the fault of the designer, *not* the user, if your product isn’t intuitive or if they use the product in a manner that you didn’t originally intend.

Speaking as someone who has had 2 different Lacie d2’s spontaneously fail, well before thier MTBF, and as an unsolicited techsupport person for several other post-houses in my town who have *also* experienced higher than normal failures of Lacie drives, I have to echo the concerns of others who don’t have very high confidence in the reliability of Lacie’s products.

Since my last Lacie drive croaked (which happened only a few weeks after another colleague of mine had her d2 drive fail), I started using consumer-level Maxtor OneTouch and Western Digital external drives from my local CompUSA…NONE of them have failed or given me any problems whatsoever. And they have been getting worked much harder than I ever worked my Lacie’s. And everyone I’ve recommended the Maxtors to have also experienced total reliability from them.

So while I appreciate Mat@Lacie’s willingness to follow up to posters on the Cow (most other companies wont even give you enough respect to email you, let alone actually post an open message board), it doesn’t negate the fact that Lacie drives have a sordid reputation for a reason, and the criticisms of people like Sean should be listened to and taken seriously, instead of just being dismissed as statistical anomalies.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Mel Matsuoka] “[Sean ONeil] I trusted LaCie to have the kind of foresight needed to prevent their customers from making potential grave mistakes.

This is really the crux of the issue.

It’s one thing for a user to not RTFM for a particular product, and then complain that they can’t figure out how to use it. It’s quite another to expect them to be fully aware of the potentially irreversable electrical damage that can be caused by plugging in an adapter for a similar product from the same manufacturer, *and* which are physically compatible with each other. That’s just BAD DESIGN on the manufacturer’s part, and it’s really not Sean’s fault for making the mistake that he did. At the very least, the enclosure should have been designed so that the power circuitry of the enclosure itself fries *itself* before it ever has a chance to torch the drive electronics.”

Ever notice how all those little 9V adapters all have the exact same circular pin for the power connection to the product, but they can work in two different ways? Positive can either be on the outer ring or in the middle. If you connect the wrong version to your product, you fry it. I have 4 or 5 of these little pin connectors for small monitors, my black burst Maxtor FW 800’s and several other products in my rack. Some are positive on the outside, some are positive in the middle. NONE of them tell me which is which down by the actual plug end so they all look identical to me or anyone else who would be in the back of the rack unit. So each one of them has a label with the name of the product it’s to be plugged in to.

So using your argument, Maxtor would be to blame if I fried it by connecting the power supply for my A/D audio converter, which looks identical, because that little circular pin doesn’t say “Maxtor One Touch 500GB” right on it. I don’t think Maxtor would agree, they would blame me for connecting the wrong power source. That’s exactly what LinkSYS told me when I accidentally fried our wireless router by connecting the power from our digital camera to it by mistake. The power ring was reversed and a nice puff of smoke came out of the unit. I had to buy a new one.

What happened to Sean completely sucks and he has a right to be upset. But the problem in this case lies with the user and the production facility, not with the manufacturer. Again, label everything in your shop today so something like this doesn’t happen to you.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Mike Mihalik]

Sean,

I am from engineering, and wanted to respond to your post.

1) All d2 Power supplies are compatible, same connector, same pin location (5V, 12V, GND, GND).

LaCie logo, Plug definition, Voltage and Amp are printed on the power supply itself. (not on the product)

Issue can

[Aaron Neitz]

Sean, I feel your pain… Some years ago I did the EXACT same thing…. you could see the carbon scoring inside on the FW bridge, and the hard drives had gone to heaven.

Of course all the LaCie fanboys are going to call you a idiot. But personally we’ve had too many failures of LaCie drives that had nothing to do with my inattentiveness and have since migrated to other solutions.

In our studio: 2 of 8 LaCie drives have failed (no including the one I fried)
0 of 17 Fantom drives have failed
0 of 3 G-Raids have failed
0 of 5 G-Tech drives have failed