Lacie Hard drive – Vertical vs. horizontal

[Bob Zelin]

you bought a Lacie drive. No matter what you do, your drive will be dead within 12 months. With all the rants on Creative Cow, I don’t know how you wound up with a Lacie drive. Forget horizontal or vertical, get an ice pack, and surround your Lacie drive if you want to have half a chance.

Bob Zelin

[Micah Mcdowell]

A Google search brought up MANY discussions about this; the consensus is that the drive orientation makes no difference whatsoever with modern hard drive technology. As long as the drives have good airflow for cooling and aren’t suspect to excess vibration, it doesn’t matter what way they point.

As Bob said, many people have had issues with Lacie drives. I used a Firewire external Lacie for a while and it would randomly disappear upon booting my system; after a restart it’d be fine. Some people love ’em though. Your mileage may vary, but I wouldn’t bet my life on them.

[Bob Zelin]

the only people that “love em” say “hey, this is the cheapest thing I could find, and it works fine – I was able to get 3 grams of coke, and a bag of pot with the money I saved”. No one “loves” a disk drive – it either keeps working, or it doesn’t. Most Lacie drives fail. If drives didn’t fail, the cheapest one would be the only one to get.

Bob Zelin

[Joel Wenz]

I bought my lacie drives over 4.5 years ago, no problems. But since you don’t seem to like them, could you recommend something that would be more reliable? I am not partial to any particular brand of drives, as long as I can hook up an esata cable to them and they don’t die I am happy. -I am looking to purchase more drives.

-j

[Mark Suszko]

This may be apocryphal, but what I went by was the idea that vertical or horizontal was okay, but changing from one orientation to another after it was already established was considered to be tempting fate. Maybe modern drives are more robust.

[Petteri Evilampi]

I have 12 different kind of LaCie drives with different connection methods, bought during last 10 years. They are in every day video production use. None of them have ever failed, not a single file ever never missed. How is this possible Bob? Are they selling different shit in US than here in Europe? Or am i just incredible lucky?

“By doing it yourself you get exactly as it happens to outcome.”

[Nick Boxer]

I’d like a recommendation on affordable esata drives as well. Seems years ago, Lacie had a good reputation… then that went south… then (Lacie says) they made changes and all the new drives come with 3 year warranties. I bought a 500Gb Quadra about a year ago and have had good luck with it. They are not the cheapest drives, but they are in the affordable range. I was going to get a G-tech, but read so many things about them disappearing/dismounting from the desktop that I got spooked. I also don’t feel like spending the prices that Caldigit and Sonnet charge (and know several folks who have had trouble with these as well)

The problem is that complaints are anecdotal — only people who have problems complain. I like that Lacie gives a 3 year warranty… Caldigit only gives 2 years.

What do folks recommend in an affordable. multi connector (esata/firewire), drive or raid. I would like to get some reliable drives in the $200-$300 dollar range or 3-4 Tb raid in the sub $1500 price point (minimum 2 year warranty).

I am currently editing on a MacBook Pro with an expresscard 34 esata connection.

Thanks

[Maurice Jansen]

well joel.

i guess it does not matter how you rack them as long as you don’t rely on them.i feel saver with 2 medium quality HDD per project then 1 high quality with all projects on them.
we have been backuping tape’s and disk in this industry for age’s and i guess we always will. because material is only save when it’s dubt and stored somewhere else. in the end every brand will fail but the result is much more painfull with mass storage.

greet
Maurice

[Bob Zelin]

Maurice, as always, is correct. Currently the best SATA drive money can buy is the Hitachi Enterprise Saturn Drive. And you know what – THEY FAIL. Disk drives fail – that is all there is to it. I am working on my little HP xw4100 at home with a little Maxtor 40 Gig ATA internal hard drive that has been working for years – do you know what this means ? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. My home computer is not being used 24 hours a day to run hi speed video media thru it non stop. This is what PROFESSIONAL drives are for – and even these drives die. Maurice said to have backups (meaning double your cost) for everything – and he is correct. REAL projects (you know, the ones that pay you a lot of money) use more than a single backup, if it’s data only for the media.

If 20 out of 100 Lacie disk drives die – what does this mean – it means that you are OUT OF YOUR MIND to use these products. Who cares what the warantee is – don’t you have deadlines to deliver your productions to your clients, who will not pay you if there is a failure. Seagate and Hitachi offer FIVE YEAR WARANTEE’s on their SATA drives – and Lacie, G-Tech, and all the others all use Seagate and Lacie drives. (So does Cal Digit, Sonnet, Maxx Digital, etc.). If you cant get your drive out of the box, you are screwed. Who cares about the warantee. Seagate and Hitachi will replace the drives for free for 5 years. You want RELIABILITY, and Lacie’s are not reliable.

If you don’t have cooling (read: FAN) in your drive enclosure, then you have a crap drive. End of story.

Bob Zelin

[Joel Wenz]

Maurice, agreed…always good to have backups. I don’t understand what you mean when you say ” does not matter how you rack them as long as you don’t rely on them”…who has hard drives that they don’t rely on?…and if they don’t rely on them (even a little), why do they have them?

Bob, thanks for the Hitachi recommendation, I was thinking about setting up a hot swap system and i think i will look into these drives. I’m still not sure why you have such a hatred for Lacie drives. Regardless of why you don’t like them, they haven’t failed me yet. And since “all drives fail” eventually, I’ll just buy more CHEAP lacie drives to back each other up…that way I can go buy beer with my extra money!! (not into the coke, weed thing) lol

and for anyone curious the drives have been working great mounted vertical 🙂