Lacie external hard drive for FCP?

[Don Greening]

Louis,

Just a friendly reminder that when you buy your FW drive make sure the first thing you do after you hook it up to your Mac is to reformat the drive in Mac OS Extended using Apple’s Disk Utility. You’ll notice that the LaCie Porche drives you’ve got listed are both formatted in FAT32, which is the formatting used when you want to use the drive with both Mac and Windows

[Andy Edwards]

I would personally buy a G-raid style of drive that actually has a proper fan. The 6 Lacie drives I bought all died within a few months of use. If you feel like taking a chance with your data cause the price is low, then go ahead. I personally would not touch another Lacie product even if it was free….Lacie even sent me a free drive for all the hassles with the drive failures and that one failed! There are a bunch of cow users that have bought vaious Lacie products and not had a problem, so just to balance this out, you could not have a problem if you choose Lacie.

Andy

[Louis]

Hi Don and Andy, thanks for getting back to me!

Would you be able to recomend one of the drives I listed as being the best for this type of work, or even a different brand?

lol, I actually didn’t know about the reformating untill I read it on the Lacie site last night so the detailed response really helped. Creatively I seem to be doing alright, lol, technically though I’m way behind most people in my school. I really need to work on that part.

Thank you again,
Louis

[Nick Brenner]

The difference with the drives is the top one – 250gig is a 7200rpm 3.5inch external drive where the other 2 are only 2.5′ drives yet run at only 5200 speed. So work out whether you want a larger (x2) sized cased that runs faster or a slower 2.5′ drive. I’d go for the faster drive for video editing, less possibility of dropped frames etc.
cheers Nick

[Mat @ lacie]

Hello Louis,
I hope that you are doing well.
For video editing, I would recommend the following LaCie drives:

– LaCie d2 250GB (great for DV – also comes in different capacity)
https://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10059

– LaCie 500GB Big Disk (from DV to SD uncompressed)
https://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10279

In regards to a comment from Andy about cooling fans – LaCie d2 500GB, LaCie Big Disk 1TB and LaCie Bigger Disks all have a smart fan with variable speed. All d2, Big Disks and Bigger Disks all have thermal foam and aluminum design for heat dissipation.

Hope this helps.
Mat @ LaCie

[Andy Edwards]

Louis,

In regards to Mat’s comment:
“All d2, Big Disks and Bigger Disks all have thermal foam and aluminum design for heat dissipation.”

The d2’s were my problem, so don’t waste your money. Thermal foam and aluminum design for heat dissapation is a pretty bad idea for drive cooling. Probably why most of the new designs have some sort of fan.

Nice to see you monitoring the forums Mat. To bad Lacie could not save my drives before they failed. Hope your drive designs improve in the future.

Andy

[Mat @ lacie]

After 17 years in the external storage business and 2M units shipped last year, I think we have some fairly good expertise on what works and what does not 🙂 We have introduced a few weeks ago the 4th generation of d2/Big/Bigger with increased cooling to accomodate 500GB mechanisms.

Most external single drives in the market do not have fan (G-Drive, Maxtor One Touch, Western Digital, Iomega…). LaCie drives feature a fan when it is needed, for example on d2 500GB single drive. You will notice that most manufacturers do not put a fan on 500GB single drives.

Mat

[Tom Matthies]

I’m running 8 d2 type Lacie’s and they work for the most part. I do have to put an external fan on the units if the ambient room temperature gets above a certain point, however. They do run very hot and at some point I start getting dropped frames on playback until I can get the temperatures back down to normal.
They have been mostly reliable otherwise. These drives have been running for almost two years now. Knock on wood.
I also have an 800gb G-Raid as well. Very solid unit. Very reliable and it has a fan!
My 2

[Andy Edwards]

[Mat @ LaCie] “We have introduced a few weeks ago the 4th generation of d2/Big/Bigger with increased cooling to accomodate 500GB mechanisms.”

There you go, your team learned from all the failures last year that you needed to increase the cooling. My 6 failed units were the 500gig models (two 250GB drives inside one case). Sad to say, I must have been a test bed for your new development ;-(

I don’t think you will be getting any more purhcases from me, as the latest drives you replaced are starting to fail again. I wish you and your company good luck with your new products.

Andy

[Louis]

Thank you everyone for all the comments, suggestions and information.
You guys really are a life saver, I can’t say enough good stuff about this site!
Thank you again,
Louis =]

I am going to comp usa tomorrow so I will keep everyone updated on how it goes!