Lacie Drive Problems

[Jerry Hofmann]

Chances are that some of the laCie products you bought had better drives in them than others. LaCie sells so many drives that they can’t get the exact same drives supplied from any single manufacturer from run to run. So when you buy these pre-packaged drive setups, you really don’t know what you’re getting.

Jerry

[Walter Biscardi]

[Greg Jones] “I’ve been using them for years and it seems like within the last 6 months I’ve been having a lot of problems; Lost media, drives not booting up, drives freezing up.”

When you say “for years” how long is that, over two years? Depending on how much you use them, a life cycle for a media drive could be 2 – 4 years. Also, heat can kill a drive unit faster than anything so hopefully you’ve kept it running in a cool environment.

I generally start replacing any unit that is approaching or over 2 years old. Anything older than that reverts to a backup role only or is sold. I have some almost 5 year old Lacie 80GB drives that still work reliably as an occassional backup device. I’ve also had three week old Fibre Channel systems fail. Drives will fail eventually, probably about time to replace that one.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
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[Greg Jones]

Actually what I mean is that the newer Lacie Drives seem to have a lot more problems than the one’s I bought a couple of years ago. I don’t know if it’s an Apple thing or a Lacie thing but within the last 6 months any time I buy a Lacie drive it always seem to have weird problems.

Greg Jones
D7,Inc.
orlando,Fl,

[Walter Biscardi]

[Greg Jones] “Actually what I mean is that the newer Lacie Drives seem to have a lot more problems than the one’s I bought a couple of years ago.”

Oh, well that’s different. Are you running on an Intel box? I had a problem with the SATA card drivers on my Mac Pro and could not get the Lacie S2S to mount up correctly on that machine. They work flawlessly on the G5’s.

What are some of the weird problems you’re having? And did you erase / initialize the drive before you used it for the first time? I know they mount right up when you plug them in, but you should always do a clean erase from your system before using and obviously, erase them as often as possible to maintain the best performance.

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

[Boyd Mccollum]

I’ve had some problems with Lacies that I’ve purchased in the last couple of years (2-500G and 1-1TB). There are a couple of failure points (the drives themselves have been okay):

– The external power supply “bricks.”

– The “bridgeset” / “chipset” (ATA to FW electronics)

The bridgeset has been my biggest problem. The solution was to buy new external cases and put the drives in them.

Similar to what Walter mentioned, I have a couple of smaller Lacie drives that I use as backups.

[Mat @ lacie]

Hi Greg,
It could simply be a power suplly issue. You should contact our tech support at support@lacie.com.
Thanks.
Mat @ LaCie