To Mat@LaCie

[Steve Eisen]

All drives will fail! Proper maintenance will prolong its life. What do you want Lacie to do? Give you a brand new drive? If it is under warranty they will. You and only you have many choices for hard drives and enclosures.

I hear your pain but offer no simpathy (please don’t take it personally). We all have had HD’s fail on us one time or another.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Director-At-Large
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Ed Dooley]

Did you send this directly to Mat@Lacie too (or first)? I usually think of these sort of posts as last resort “they won’t
respond to my e-mails so I’m posting it here” posts.
Ed

[David Roth weiss]

Don,

A few weeks back I exchanged a few posts with Mat from LaCie. If you can find that thread you will see that, according to Mat, LaCie uses consumer-level drives rather than enterprise-level drives. And, he further states that this now typical of “the industry.” Here’s why this is a problem waiting to happen…

Buying hard drives is a bit like buying life insurance. Consumer-level drives carry only a one year warranty and an average life of only 100,000 hours, while enterpise-level drives carry a five year warranty with an average life of 500,000 hours — that’s a 500% difference no mater how you slice it, and amazingly, you don’t even have to pay extra to get that. You can luck out, and end up with a 100,000 hour hard drive that lasts for years, but you’re just playing a game of numbers, because the average life expectancy of those drives means that half the drives fail at just 50,000 hours, while the other half lasts for 200,000 hours. Meanwhile, half of the enterprise-level drives may fail after just 250,000 hours, but the other half will last for 1,000,000 hours. So, even a faulty enterprise-level drive should last longer than the very best consumer-level hard drive. It doesn’t take a genius to see the advantage…

Consumer-level drives are simply not built to the same standards, and they are not built to the standards that video professionals require if they want truly reliable, and long-lasting hard drive subsystems. Companies like LaCie are in business to provide quick, cheap, and easy solutions. So, if you want proven reliability, don’t expect to find it in components that have math that is not on your side.

DRW

[Arnie Schlissel]

First thing you should know: clicking is very baaad. It’s probably the sound of a read/write head banging against a platter & scratching it beyond use. IOW, that drive has had a hardware failure & cannot be recovered.

Second thing you should know: LaCie’s Big Disk series is RAID 0, which is striped to make 2 or more drives into a larger, single volume. there’s no redundancy, and if one drive out of the set fails, you’ve lost all data on the set. These drives may be a little bit sensitive to movement while they’re powered up. The same thing happened to a friend of mine after he accidentally tipped one over while it was powered up.

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[Walter Biscardi]

[Steve Eisen] “All drives will fail! Proper maintenance will prolong its life. What do you want Lacie to do? Give you a brand new drive? If it is under warranty they will. You and only you have many choices for hard drives and enclosures.

I hear your pain but offer no simpathy (please don’t take it personally). We all have had HD’s fail on us one time or another.”

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. The only way to protect yourself is go with something that’s a RAID 3 or other protection scheme on a your array. I’ve run Med

[Ed Dooley]

Just to correct/clarify,
The Maxtor consumer line, the DiamondMax, carries a 3 year warranty. The enterprise versions, the MaxLines, carry a 5 year.
And this from Seagate’s site:
“Now every Seagate internal hard drive for PCs, notebook computers and entry-level servers purchased from an authorized Seagate Distributor and Reseller will be covered under our unprecedented Five-Year Warranty.”

“The five-year warranty applies to all customers who purchase drives either directly through Seagate (distributors), or through the Authorized Distribution channel. This includes Channel SIs, System Builders, Retail customers, and Bare drive customers who purchase through Distributors. There will be no changes to our OEM/System Manufacturer agreements that purchase product directly from Seagate.”
Seagates you buy in retail kits still have a 1 year warranty, but bare drives that aren’t enterprise drives have had the 5 year warranty since 2004.
Ed

[David Roth Weiss] “Consumer-level drives carry only a one year warranty and an average life of only 100,000 hours, while enterpise-level drives carry a five year warranty with an average life of 500,000 hours — that’s a 500% difference no mater how you slice it,”

[Mat @ lacie]

Hello Don,
I hope that you are doing well. You catch me at a bad time since I am in Costa Rica with a weak wi-fi connection 🙂 Hey, I am not complaining 🙂 That’s how responsive we are at LaCie LOL

First, it’s unfortunate that you ran into a problem with this drive. We will fix it for you, no problem. You can contact our tech support (support@lacie.com) or give them a call. Or you can shoot me an email next week when I am back in the office.

There would be a lot of reasons for you to remain a loyal LaCie customer. I’ll try to summarize this way: when you buy a LaCie drive, you get the best solution at a fair price and the guarantee that it delivers the latest – reliable – technology available. Our return rate (including drives with no problem found) ranges from 0.5% to 3.5% depending on the line of products. We have been doing external storage for 17 years, and our support has always been praised, from the time we shipped 2000 drives/year to now with 2M+ drives/year. We never talk about our competition so I am not about to start now. We have the largest offering so we hope that you will always find the appropriate solutions from us. We were recently voted Best Hardware and Best Vendor by US resellers/retailers.

Now I need to correct David statement. I never said that we are using consumer level drives vs entreprise level drives. I simply explained that warranty on drives sold to OEM (like Apple, Dell, LaCie…) may be different than warranty on the same drives sold in retail under Seagate, WD or Hitachi brands. Mechanisms can be identical, it has nothing to do with the quality. Maxtor, Seagate and WD external drives sold in retail carry a 1 year warranty too – that’s the part that’s standard. We are not in the business of selling cheap unreliable products. We would not have been in business for that long and we would not be doing that well if it was the case. Because we are able to sell solutions for less than smaller competitors, it does not mean that we use less reliable components. It simply mean that our competitors have higher costs and try to justify their price difference, mostly through marketing. Just don’t hate LaCie because we are more visible and we offer products that customers can afford 🙂 We don’t think that there is anything cool about buying overpriced products.

Ok, I deserved a drink now 🙂
Mat @ LaCie
mgasquy@lacie.com

[David Roth weiss]

Ed,

Unfortunately your post doesn’t clarify, as you skirted the most important issue I raised in my previous post. I’m not sure if you just wanted point out any ommisions I might have made, or what, but my central point, which you failed to even mention, was about life expectancy, or MTBF (mean time bewteen failiures as its know in the industry). It is the only scientific way to judge hard drive reliability. Brand names are really irrelevant. If your Seagate has a 500,000 hour MTBF, its statiscally every bit as reliable as any other brand with the same MTBF. The point is, if a manufacturer is putting drives in its products that only have one year warranties, its no wonder that some of them fail at six months. Its all about averages.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

[Mat @ LaCie] “I never said that we are using consumer level drives vs entreprise level drives.”

Mat,

Go and enjoy your drink and have a great vacation. When you get back we’ll revisit this, because I want to know, does LaCie use enterprise level drives in their products or not??? More importantly, what is the MTBF for the drives LaCie uses in their products?

THNX,
David

[Walter Biscardi]

[David Roth Weiss] “It is the only scientific way to judge hard drive reliability. Brand names are really irrelevant. If your Seagate has a 500,000 hour MTBF, its statiscally every bit as reliable as any other brand with the same MTBF. The point is, if a manufacturer is putting drives in its products that only have one year warranties, its no wonder that some of them fail at six months. Its all about averages.”

David, you seem to be on a mission to show that enterprise level drives are the only drives one should consider for storage as they are the most reliable. Arrays are so much more than just the type of drive that’s installed inside the array.

If you’re creating your own JBOD, which you advocate all over these forums, then you better get the absolute best drive you can purchase because you’re going to be R&D, Tech Support, Editor and Beta Tester all in one. When purchasing a pre-configured product, it’s more than just about the actual drive unit being installed. There’s more “under the hood” than just drives with say Med