Mini review of the LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB (1000gig) drive

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.)

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

Lacie Terabytes Bigger Disk Triple Interface 1T , 1.2T , 2T are not the ideal solution for the massive scale production.

first problem they take long time to load and consume too much from your CPU that could make your OS unstable.

second in certain situations they keep trying to initialize and they never load.

third they stop responding sometimes and affect other disks if you are using more than one.

save your time first don't buy lacie , if you do buy it you will lose too much time , precious data and of course money.

LaCie 1TB Bigger Disk Extreme

I HAVE THE FIRST 1TB "BIG DRIVE"..... A PICE OF SHITE!



I ECHO EVERYTHING THAT "Nour E Ghtami" SAY IN HIS REVIEW .....(HE SOUNDS VERY INTELLIGENT AND WELL SPOKEN)

4 250GB DRIVES AND DATA SPANED OVER ALL, MEANS THAT I MAY NOT BE ABLE TO RETRIVE FULL OR COMPLETE FILES, THEY MAY BE BROKEN UP OVER THE FOR DRIVES!!!

I 
JUST CRACKED THE SHELL AND HOOKED UP A 5 IN 1 SERIAL ATA TO USB CABLE KIT.... MAYBE I CAN SAVE HALF OF MY 78,900 SONGS!?!?!?



I WILL LET U KNOW HOW THIS WORKED OUT.

G-TECH OR GLYPH DRIVES ARE THE WAY TO GO IF YOU BUY ONE PRE ASSEMBLED.



OR 

BUY A SEPARATE DRIVE AND SEPARATE ENCLOSURE AND SAVE YOUR SELF A BUNDLE!



HAPPY STORING (HUH?)

Well, this is an important addition regarding the Lacie 1T , 1.2T , 2T.

I have enumerated couple of deffects in Lacie 2 years ago when i was using them in my business in london. then after things went very bad with Lacie externel drives, the result was:
1- i took Lacie out of the production line and used freecom instead (excellent performance)
2- lost £5400, be 6 Lacie triple interface 2T drives
3- i opened the faulty Lacie case and found 4x500 Gigabytes hard drives (Desk star and baraccuda), an interface card and two small mesirable funs for cooling. then realised what causes all these problems. It was the heat. the inferface card stops functioning under higher temperature as the two small funs don't help to lower the heat inside the case.
4- Lacie in their labs knew the problem but still were selling their junk stuff to the world.

well, the conclusions:
1- Lacie is far faraway from the required technology, briefly Lacie is an intruder to the business of making hard drives.
2- before you buy any massive production drive make sure to check the cooling system, read the reviews, read about the interface card, check the voltage. if you are happy buy just one drive and test it in a room or office that is not using any cooling or conditioning system. you will be able to judge what you have bought.

Nour E Ghtami

Programmer and owner of NEG DIGITALWORKS LTD