Mini review of the LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB (1000gig) drive
It's big and heavy.
It's loud. Sounds like an old Volvo.
It's fast (65meg/sec transfer), but not nearly as fast as the 90meg/sec claimed by LaCie.
If I had to do it over again I would have probably bought a 2 500s.
It's loud. Sounds like an old Volvo.
It's fast (65meg/sec transfer), but not nearly as fast as the 90meg/sec claimed by LaCie.
If I had to do it over again I would have probably bought a 2 500s.
5 Comments:
The 500GB LaCie is nice and quiet, gets a little hot, not much more then their D2 drives. I mainly use the 500gb as backup storage, and keep my smaller d2 drives for working with video. (less media to lose if those drive fails.)
I wish I had read your pithy review before buying my own. Your commparison of the noise level to a Volvo was off. My Volvo never made anywhere near this much noise. And no response from customer support.
Once again, I too wish i had seen this review before i had purchased my 1TB lacie drive. I took mine back as i thought the noise was excessive, but the lacie guy said it was spose to sound like a washing machine.
PIECE OF JUNK. DON'T BUY IT!
I wish I'd read your review before buying the LaCie 1TB Bigger Disk Triple Interface FireWire and USB 2.0 Hard Drive!
After purchasing this product, I could never partition the drive as one large 1TB partition -- kept getting errors from Windows XP. Later, files I stored on one of the partitions became unreadable when I tried to access them. Finally, Windows XP's CHKDSK program couldn't even complete a scan of the partition, due to bad sectors.
30 minutes on hold with LaCie Tech Support and I learned that not only was LaCie unwilling to make any concessions for a drive that was only 2 months out of warranty, but LaCie couldn't even offer a repair service if I wished to have it fixed at my expense! ...to say nothing of the personal pain of losing hundreds of personal photo files to the drive's data errors.
More info that may help others:
The LaCie 1TB Bigger Disk Triple Interface FireWire and USB 2.0 Hard Drive is actually 4 Western Digital Caviar WD2500JB-FUAO IDE disk drives made to appear as one drive via a custom printed circuit board. This whole assembly is then joined via a single IDE interface to a separate board that converts FireWire800, FireWire400 and/or USB 2.0 to IDE. Whereas the individual disk drives are whisper-quiet, LaCie cools them with a single 40mm Sunon KD1204PFB1 case fan. That fan, itself is supposed to be one of the quitest available, but the whole assembly in its aluminum shell makes quite a racket!
If I wanted to get my unit working again, LaCie Tech Support advised that my only option was to disassemble the unit, myself, test each of the 4 WD drives, independently by connecting them to the IDE interfaces on my computer and replace the defective drive(s), myself at about $150 a piece. Whereas I'm doing all of this, I'm far from certain that the "repaired" unit will be trustworthy -- after all, it'll still have that circuit board that might be introducing the data errors.
Summary: Don't buy LaCie. Don't buy external hard disk units that present more than one hard disk as a "single" drive!
To Anonymous that lost the pics: If you know anybody with a copy of Steve Gibsons Spinrite program, it may be able to get back some of your pic's... It's also worth the money to buy it (speaking as someone who has recovered data with it)
go to www.grc.com or google it...
Good Luck
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