Customer Reviews

LaCie 1 TB Bigger Disk Triple Interface FireWire and USB 2.0 Hard Drive (300875)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

It may not be a bug with Lacie (could be inherent to USB 2.0, or XP SP2, or ???), but whoever is at fault, the drive constantly gives hardware errors when copying large numbers of files (such as thousands of MP3 files). LaCie support is unhelpful despite the fact that if you do a web search, tons of people are having "delayed write failed" problems with LaCie drives. Save yourself a lot of aggravation and avoid LaCie products.

As of right now, I am an Apple Student Developer

Most of my work comes from Filmmaking, as I'm an Independent Filmmaker, and all of my post production work relies heavily upon my Apple G5 Tower, as well as a TON of external harddrive storage

While some of my LaCie HD's have worked great, many of them have simply failed me

here are the pro's -

1. great interface - both FireWire 400 and 800, and they are easy to daisychain

2. they are fast - 7200 RPM, and usually, if the drive is good, the performance will show

CONS -

1. very weak body ---- forget if you drop this thing even one inch - it'll be dead

2. very tough to hookup to other drives -- when I say this, I mean it is impossible to stack this drive, or try and put it in a space where it'll stay put

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM ---

I don't know what accounts for this - whether its the bridge or the drive itself - but LaCie's drives fail way too much

I've probably purchased around 14 LaCie drives in the past 4 years, for varioius film projects and associate ones ----- of the 14, I have had 5 completely fail on me

This is simply unacceptable for any drive company

when you consider it all, companies like MAXTOR offer drives with the same interface, same speeds, but at a lower price

with that said, take a look at MAXTOR, whose drives are housed in a very indestructive body (...)
On a sidenote, LaCie has honored the warranties on their drives, and when they're open, their customer service is very helpful --- but I've lost too much data, at this point, to recommend them

I have purchased 10 of these drives, all at once. What a mistake. They are very flakey and will 'disappear' while copying data to them by usb. You have to turn the drive off and back on for windows to find it again. I do not have this problem with any other usb drive only Lacie drives. You cannot use one as a backup for this very reason, copying large amounts of data will fail and you have to start over or copy in chunks.

One drive failed after 8 months, only at the 10 month mark did I realize it was still under warranty. It had a 1 year warranty so 2 months left, I contacted lacie and after asking for a copy of the original invoice which clearly listed the purchase date they began ignoring my email and would not honor their warranty, no RMA after requesting one 5 times, no more email responses since they could not come up with a reason to refuse service. Do not buy one of these, there are many drives with longer warranties that are more reliable from better companies.

Yes, it is blazingly fast. Yes it is a tun of storage for below the magic $1/GB mark. Yes it looks good.

It is so LOUD that you won't be able to stand being in the same room with it. If you are planning on recording any audio or video (w/ sound) in the same room as this drive, you had better change plans. This thing is LOUD. I have never owned any disc drive anywhere near as loud. It is too LOUD to be in the same room with.

LaCie customer support has not responded to any of my inquiries.

Please don't do as I did and ignore the reviews that complain of the LOUD noise. If you will have to spend any time in the same room as this drive - take a pass and buy something else. You will not be able to stand being in the same room with this LOUD monster.

PIECE OF JUNK. DON'T BUY IT!

I wish I'd read reviews like the others on amazon.com before buying the LaCie 1TB Bigger Disk Triple Interface FireWire and USB 2.0 Hard Drive!

After purchasing this product from another online merchant, 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!

This drive suffers from repeated Delayed Write File errors. Ultimately it means you WILL lose all the data on it.
It is extremely noisy to the point of damaging your hearing.
Lacie support is poor.
AVOID!

My first drive was extremely loud and finally it started to smoke... The replacement has an extremely loud fan and the support argues that it is not loud at all. I have tried to get it replaced with two 500 MB drives (which are silent - no fan) without any succes. When the drive is working it is almost like being in a serverroom. If you want to have a low noise level when working do look for another drive!

This drive hasn't quite lived up to it's marketing. Ordered two and one was dead right out of the box. The current two have been up and running without any problems. However the cooling fan is the loudest i've heard on any electronic device outside of a server room. It's so loud i leave the drive off when i'm not backing up to it. I'm not kidding. Both drives are like this. One of them makes an on again off again low whinning noise which I hope doesn't develop into a physical problem with the drive. Search around before considering this one.

I purchased three 1TB Lacie drives and have used them on multiple computers and different ports. Over the past 2 weeks all of them have failed during copying of large numbers of files. Delay Write Failed. Many people are having the same problem. I thought I knew better than other people. Last Lacie purchase for me ever.

Failed a couple months past the 1 year warranty. Inexcusable. Storage devices of this size capacity are NOT disposable.
(note: the drives inside the case are fine, the failure is apparently in the power supply or usb connection. If yours has failed, at least save yourself the internal drives as they are likely fine; it is lacies crappy case hardware that is likely at fault.)