SWAPPING HARD DRIVE ON OLDER LACIE

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
I bought an old FW400/800 LaCie Big Disk case on eBay – the original pair of 250GB drives had been removed before sale.
I just popped in two 400GB Seagate IDE drives that I had to hand, set them as Master/Slave, and it works perfectly as a (nominally) 800GB drive.

I would guess all recent (post 2004) cases would take an upgrade just fine.

[Tom Matthies]

I’m looking at a pile of Big Disk drives on my work bench that have failed. The only thing that I wonder about when replacing the drives in a Big Disk unit is the fact that heat is most likely what caused the drives to fail in the first place and there isn’t much space inside that case. If the drives are replaced, won’t they simply burn up again, especially when putting bigger drives in the enclosure? Bigger drives usually mean more heat and heat is not good in this case.
Any track record on that rebuilt drive? Still working OK?

Tom

[Jim Blokland]

Yes, I’d be interested in hearing more about heat-related performance in this enclosure. Although, I’ve used some drives in pretty hot enclosures in the past without issue.

And the funny thing is, I’ve worked with LaCie drives on many shows (including an 8x1HR series I just completed) and I’ve never had one fail. But like your story Tom, I’ve certainly read that they can and do fail. In this case, I’m using the drive primarily as a ‘transport bucket’ for a P2 feature I’m cutting. I’ll back-up the rest of the files elsewhere, so if it does fail, I’d be covered.

Anyone else care to chime in?

Best, JIM.

OSX.4.3
Dual 2.7 G5
3.5 GB RAM
Radeon X800 XT
Kona 2 / K-Box
Seritek 1.2 TB RAID
AVID XPRESS PRO/MOJO

[Tom Matthies]

I’ve had both good and bad luck with these drives. I have a few that have been running for a number of years now with nary a hiccup out of them. On the other hand, I have three Big Disks and a collection of the smaller D2 type disks that are all flaky and unreliable. Some seem able to be “fixed” with new power supplies, some just never seem to recover. I have a pair on my home system that are about 2-1/2 years old. I run them as a striped pair. One is always reliable while the other will be sitting there, idle, and then just start clicking and making an assortment of noises. I backed all of the files off of it and onto a pair of SATA drives in an external enclosure and haven’t had a problem since. The two Lacies sit on my backup system, basically waiting to die. 🙁
I’ve noticed that these drives do run very hot within the aluminum enclosures, especially the dual drive Big Disks. There just isn’t anywhere for the heat to bleed out of the boxes. I assume that the aluminum frame acts somewhat as a heat sink, but it seems to be too little, too late. In the summer months, I had to run a small fan on the disks to keep the temperature down. When they get too hot, they tend to cause dropped frame errors within FCP. Keep ’em cool, and they are OK.
I plan on sticking to the SATA solution for my home system. I will be adding another 2 or 4 drive enclosure in the near future when I change over to a new MacPro. These have multi-speed fans within the cases to handle the buildup of heat a little better than the older variety. I’m going to try my best to stay away from Firewire drives altogether. At work, I’m running a pair of Huge 2Tb raids and a few legacy G-Raids. They’ve never given me any problems at all…knock on wood.
I’m still debating trying to rebuild the Big Disks for fear of the same problems cropping up later. I usually use only Hitachi drives in my do-it-yourself projects. They seem to be very reliable so far and have a three year warranty to boot. If I do rebuild the Lacies, that’s what I plan on using.
They (the Lacies) are a good solution to transportable drives, so I hope I can resurrect a couple and squeeze a little more life out of them. Maybe using them only occasionally will solve the problems of their self-destruction.
We’ll see…
Tom

[James Reid]

The biggest problem will be the power supply.
A 500 GB drive put into a 250 GB enclosure will
likely exceed the ability of the power supplied by the brick.
It will probably burn out.
You could always buy another power supply with higher
curent output. If you look at the supplies that LaCie
provides for replacement, you should be able to figure
out which one to buy.
Two examples:

d2 Power Supply – for Hard Drive capacity up to 320GB

Bigger Disk Power Supply – for 500GB Hard Drive capacity

An these two power supplies have different incompatible connectors.

[Paul Dickin]

[JR-Links] “Two examples:
d2 Power Supply – for Hard Drive capacity up to 320GB
Bigger Disk Power Supply – for 500GB Hard Drive capacity
An these two power supplies have different incompatible connectors.”
Hi
Not found that to be the case in the UK, connectors and rated output seem to be the same – for d2 <320GB or Big Disk500GB dual drives, but I haven't used a bigger LaCie than that.

I too use an external fan to keep the aluminium drive-case cool. But I didn't until recently and a Big Disk 500GB from late 2004 is still going strong having spent most of its life uncooled flat on top of a G5 (so maybe the G5 drive cool fans were helping it.)