LaCie External HDs, Reliable?

R

RevURGT3

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Howdy!

I need to buy an external HD for backups and I was about to buy the LaCie 500GB with USB/FWs. In newegg.com there are two reviews about these HDs crashing and I have found a few horror histories here too... are they that bad???

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I actually hear they're quite good. But if a certain percentage of harddrives fail in normal use, there's still a slight chance that you could get a bad one. I've bought three Maxtor FW drives, read a lot of bad reports but never actually had problems with them (other than a strange one that needed a driver update, which promptly solved the problem). But basically, I hear LaCie's drives are good, too.
 
I have a 160GB D2 model and it has been rock solid since day one. LaCie's products come highly recommended in the Mac community.

One thing to note about NewEgg reviews: everyone claims to be an expert, while in reality most aren't. I've rarely seen someone post anything other than "This reviewer reports that his/her technical understanding of this type of product is high..." before. It wouldn't surprise me if most caused the issues they had by not protecting their computers (Windows PCs) properly or by improperly unplugging the drives (not ejecting/unmounting them first) and corrupting the files and file system. I've actually watched misinformed sales people at CompUSA and other such places (Circuit City, Best Buy, etc.) tell customers doing that won't hurt anything.
 
I, personally, have had bad experiences with LaCie. We had a LaCie pocket drive that, one day, just failed. i had used it via both FireWire and USB, and one day, it just wouldn't show up. Via FireWire or USB. Years later, i ripped it apart, and put a known-working hard disk on the drive circuit board, and it didn't show up. So LaCie's drive controller circuitry went bad.

We also had a LaCie CD-RW external drive that, after 5 years, just stopped reading discs.
 
I've gone off LaCie a bit.

I had a LaCie porche 160GB ext. drive that died about 6 months after purchase. There's a thread in this forum where a couple people (including myself) reported having the same experience.

The HDD itself was fine, but the enclosure just stopped working.

Thing is, too, that if you buy a pre-built extenral disk you have no control over the brand of HDD that goes into it, or the quality of the case. I would recommend buying each seperately; say, a Western Digital HD and a good quality Firewire/USB2 case. Personally I like the IceCube II
 
Thank The Cheese said:
I've gone off LaCie a bit.

I had a LaCie porche 160GB ext. drive that died about 6 months after purchase. There's a thread in this forum where a couple people (including myself) reported having the same experience.

The HDD itself was fine, but the enclosure just stopped working.

Thing is, too, that if you buy a pre-built extenral disk you have no control over the brand of HDD that goes into it, or the quality of the case. I would recommend buying each seperately; say, a Western Digital HD and a good quality Firewire/USB2 case. Personally I like the IceCube II
Click to expand...

I completely agree. To discuss the quality or reliability of LaCie vs any other "packager" is kind of pointless. They don't make the drives themselves and they don't make the controller chips. I have a older LaCie and it's got a Fujitsu drive in it. I found that updating the firmware was confusing and not all that reliable.

Now I do the same, buy drives and enclosures separately, Hitachi Drives and Bytec enclosures. The enclosures work fine and they're inexpensive. If one should fail I'll just get a new one or something else.
 
Thank The Cheese said:
I had a LaCie porche 160GB ext. drive that died about 6 months after purchase.
Click to expand...
The Porsche drives aren't worth squat IMO...a lot of people have reported issues with those models. I'd definitely recommend to anyone spending the money on one that they spend the small bit extra for the D2 series drives.


adambyte said:
We also had a LaCie CD-RW external drive that, after 5 years, just stopped reading discs.
Click to expand...
Five years out of a drive like that (CD/DVD) isn't bad at all really. They see a totally different kind of use than a HD does, not to mention they much more prone to the ravages of dirt and other contaminants from normal use.
 
I have a Porsche FW over a year now. It gets a lot of use, and so far I can't complain. I certainly have read people that have had trouble.
 
I have a 100GB mobile Firewire/USB2 drive and it's been working hard for the last 8 months. I use it every day, and it's always connected to my iBook. There are other drives out there, but I wanted a tiny one, and LaCie offered the size, price, and interfaces that I wanted.
 
It's funny how some people have a lot of bad experiences with a certain brand. There are many posts from angry people who have had to return or repair every Apple product they've bought, yet most others have had no problems. Just luck of the draw I guess.

Although my experiences with LaCie aren't good, I think it's unfair to make a general "LaCie sucks" statement. I just think building your own external drive is the best way of making sure you won't have any problems.
 
Thank The Cheese said:
I just think building your own external drive is the best way of making sure you won't have any problems.
Click to expand...
Especially when building your own drive means sliding an HD onto a circuit board, inserting four screws and then maybe a couple more screws to close the enclosure.

At the moment I have two identical external drives so if I should have a problem I can swap the parts around to troubleshoot.
 
I only bought the LaCie drive because:
1. It was both FireWire and USB.
2. It was very small (only a bit larger than a notebook hard drive itself).
3. Because it was guaranteed to be bootable as a startup volume.

Other than that, building your own drive can be better, in many respects.
 
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