Lacie Drives stink–any other suggestions?

[Aaron Neitz]

Lacie has been very unreliable for us. we went to G-Raid for firewire and won’t go back. More expenseive per gig, but a much better product. honestly I think Lacie’s no-fan / radiative heat design is stupid considering how hot those things get to the touch, especially for video work… G-Raid has fans in their enclosures.

[Walter Biscardi]

Sorry, LaCie drives don’t stink. You obviously have some issues with the set you have.

First off, did you re-format them before you ever used them? If so, are they formatted for Mac Extended? Are they sharing a FW bus with a DV device?

Finally, have you contacted LaCie tech support to discuss this issue?

The only other drives I recommend for FW are G-Tech drives. I run both G-Tech and LaCie for FW and just took delivery of a LaCie SATA array for some testing. I highly recommend both companies.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

“The Rough Cut,” an original short film premiering December 7th in full High Definition in Atlanta.
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“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Walter Biscardi]

[CharlieX2] “G-Raid has fans in their enclosures.”

Only in the G-RAIDs, not the G-Drive’s which use a heat sink.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

“The Rough Cut,” an original short film premiering December 7th in full High Definition in Atlanta.
rsvp@biscardicreative.com to reserve seats.
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

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

[Aaron Neitz]

We had 2 of their Big Disk Extremes burn out on us. One had little wisps of smoke coming out 🙂 And these are drives living in a cooled machine room. We threw in the towel at that point. Maybe we got a bad batch, but that was enough down time and media we had to re-digitize that it wasn’t worth buying another one.

[Wes Plate]

Naomi, you’re not the only one to have had a bad “set”. We had two out of three LaCie 500GB drives die, we replaced them with G-RAIDs. We’re happy. Many users on the FCP-L have spoke about how they also had bad drives. I heard something about 18 out of 30 dying at a major Boston-area university.

While I’m sure Walter has had very good luck with his LaCie drives, I have not had his good experience.

Oh, as to “what did LaCie say?” The first time one of my 500GB LaCies died LaCie replaced it for free– it was under warranty– but they would not attempt to recover my data. Drives are cheap, the data they contain is much more valuable. The next time I had a drive fail (so I guess it ended up being 3 out of 4 drives, I forgot about the replacement) I didn’t bother contacting LaCie, instead I contacted a G-RAID dealer.

— Wes Plate
Automatic Duck

[Michael Belanger]

Unfortunately I agree with Wes on this one. While Lacie has some good products, the fanless design drives
really don’t cut it for video production in my experience. As an editor for over 22 years and having worked with FCP since the beginning and having built my own drive arrays I can tell you that the lacies run too hot for my taste. I, too, had some drives die on me, an extreme 500 and some non extremes. Awhile back I had one of my two extremes die on me, clicking sound, so had to replace one of the two drives inside. Fortunately it was under warranty but it took a few days to fix. Oddly enough, though, there were no replacement drives in the city, go figure. I had to scramble and get the G techs which were equally hard to find in town. Lucky for me. They have run flawlessly for over a year and now that’s all I use in both suites. Granted this is not a raid 5 scenario but with just tape footage and some render files on the drives, everything is easily re loaded. I also recommend them. The other nice thing about them is that they deliver consistent performance across the entire drive even when it gets full. No point in having a terabyte of storage if the last 150 gig are slower and have dropped frames.

all the best

Mike Belanger
Dandelion Editing
Toronto Canada
Currently editing its second HDCAM film shot 24P

[Gary Hughes]

I’ve heard bad things about specifically the “Big Discs”. I went with G-Tech G-Raid and am very very pleased. Since then, I’ve bought some G-Drives, but not for media. I’ll only use the G-Raid for media until I decide to upgrade to a SATA raid.

You definitely want to add on a PCI firewire card (pcmcia for laptops) if you haven’t already. Don’t use the built in firewire for the drive.

Thanks,
Gary

[Sean Oneil]

LaCie is garbage. I’ve had two non-RAID drives completely fail. I’ve bought 5 of them. 2 out of 50 failing is bad, let alone 2 out of 5. I’ve heard countless stories of the same thing, including someone in the office next door. They use dirt cheap Maxtor drives, the QC is non-existant, and the enclosure design causes them to run way too hot. And they’re not inexpensive whatsoever. They market these things as if they were a Porche and they charge almost accordingly. I would reccomend any other external drive solution from any other brand over LaCie.

[Shawn Bockoven]

If you have one or two Lacie drives could be things are working well for you. However, we have 20+ Lacie drives and the do fail. Only ONE internal drive has failed in all of our Macs (various brands) in six years. The internal drives are powered up for much longer periods of time too. Probably experienced six Lacie failures in that same time. Even had an out of box bad 500GB drive recently. Testing drives for short periods of time is not a real world test. When the Lacie drives work they are great, when they fail it stinks:-)

Shawn Bockoven
EBS Television Station Manager
https://www.metv.ws

[Don Greening]

I wonder what Mat@LaCie will have to say when he shows up later today and reads all this stuff……..

I consider myself lucky I guess because I’ve got 3 LaCie FW drives and have never had a problem with any of them in over a year and a half of constant use (knocking on my wooden head for luck).

– Don