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Lacie External Hard drives?

LaCie has an awful reputation for quality. Both Seagate and Western Digital make better quality drives. LaCie has both a more capacious drive and the newer Firewire standard built in which is undoubtably faster, but that's not enough for me to reccomend them. An external harddrive's primary function is as a backup device--in my view, that means that reliability must be the primary consideration.
 
Think about it you have 4 drives in close proximity all spinning creating tons of heat and then you top it off by only having passive cooling and closed air system.
 
The lacie drives are just 2 (or 4) normal hard drives in a firewire box.

The build quality is a lot better than most external enclosures -thick extruded metal, and good quality connectors with secure mounting for the HDs, with some space for air circulation.

We had a 400 GB one at work which got dropped, so we took it apart. 2 200 GB WD drives. The drives aren't in RAID (they're just spanned [JBOD]) - so don't expect massive data rates even with the IEEE1394-800 interface. As an aside, we swapped the original drives out for a pair of 400 GB seagates, and it worked fine - detected straight away as a 750 GB drive.

 
Originally posted by: jpeyton
Well I've never had an issue with Lacie's smaller drives, but if their larger ones do indeed have problems, try this one instead (heard great things about it): http://www.newegg.com/product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822155306
Click to expand...

anything from them in usb/firewire?

EDIT: Also, do all of the 1TB external drives just have 250GB Drives x4?

So basically, if one fails, I still have information from the other 3, correct?
 
So basically, if one fails, I still have information from the other 3, correct?
Click to expand...

Theoretically, that's correct. In practice, if one drive goes, don't count on getting anything back at all.

The problem is that only the first drive hold the file tables and indexes. Plus if there is file fragmentation then it means that the files may be broken up into chunks with different chunks on each drive.

Basically, although the 2nd drive in the dropped box was the one that failed, we couldn't get any data off the other (although we didn't try very hard - it was mainly digital videos and we still had the original tapes). It possible that high quality data recovery software may have been able to recover some of the files.
 
I have a LaCie 160 FW 800 drive. Been working for a year so far on my Powerbook, though the 1 year warranty sucks 🙁
 
I have a bunch of those at work. They've all been pretty good, none have crapped out, but they get really hot. I wouldn't use them on anything mission critical, but they are decent short term storage.
 
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