Customer Reviews

LaCie 500 GB Big Disk Triple External Hard Drive (300721) FW/FW800 & USB2

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

I am a big fan of LaCie drives, but this drive...not so much.

In less than two weeks I had to use DiskWarrior3 at least five times to rescue the drive. The first time I lost about 4GB of data (though I later discovered that some of the other data was in fact corrupted). Obviously, there is something wrong with at least some of these drives as the problems described by others are too similar to be coincidence.

Realising the drives (this drive is actually a hardware RAID 0 consisting of two 250GB drives inside the enclosure) were about to tank, I ordered myself two 250GB LaCie drives and disconnected the 500GB less it tank again before I could do a file transfer. Well, after receiving my new drives the 500GB did tank again, but this time even DiskWarrior was useless. Drive Recover X was able to find the vast majority of the files, but I actually opted not to bother transferring them since I would then have to go through every file to check for corruptions. Since 90-95% of the data is backed-up on other drives and discs (and the other 5-10% will just require some extra work to replace) I just wiped the thing and sent it off for my refund.

I will continue to buy LaCie drives as this is the only problem I have ever had with their products, but I'm going to steer clear of these hidden RAID drives (which is a shame because I was really looking forward to getting one of the 1TB drives...). I'll stick to daisy chaining the smaller d2 drives.

Although I'm a registered user and LaCie has my e-mail address, they did NOT notify me that the drive is not compatible with Win XP SP2 -- I had to find out the hard way. I have to return the drive in order for them to upgrade the firmware (their field upgrade failed on three different machines), and they won't do a swap where they send me a replacement first -- so I have to find a way to back this whole thing up before I return it. A big pain that they could have avoided with a single, simple e-mail -- but they don't do this as a matter of policy (per their support staff). Ugh. Thanks for nothing, LaCie.

I've been using a LaCie 500 GB Big Disk for managing a large amount of media for a Final Cut Pro Project. On my Mac, it worked fine for about a year -- until a week ago. Suddenly, the files were inaccessible, and a foreboding clicking sound came from the drive. I ran disk repair utility, and I was able to again access the files -- but 3/4 of them had been wiped out! I called LaCie, and the guy wasn't particularly helpful, but he did confirm that "that clicking sound is bad news."

So I thought to myself -- at least I've backed up the data and the Big Disk is still under warranty -- I think. But when I dug out my receipt I found my purchase was exactly two weeks past one year ago. Ouch! Could they have timed it much better?

So buyer beware -- and don't fail to back up your files!

I wish I knew this was really 2 250gb drives in raid 0. Those who dont know this is really bad for mass storage. The data is striped so your chance of data loss is huge. This drive is the reason I now check Amazon's reviews before I buy anything. I used this drive for about 2 weeks and had issues with XP. The drive began to lose directories more and more. I ran checkdisk and recovered much but not nearly all of the data. I gave it a second chance but it was all down hill from there. I ran checkdisk again and cut my losses and took this junk back to the store. I informed the store clerks (They know me well) and they appreciated the info as many of them were interested in the product also. I don't know many people who would buy a massive amount of storage such as this and want to take such chances with loosing all the data on it.

FYI when the directory listings were missing most of the data was still there (-+ recent changes) the drive simply cant find it anymore and this was seen by the drive usage reported by windows being unchanged. Run a recovery utility backup to another drive and send this thing back.

The LaCie drives are a mixed bag, being extremely quiet and very fast. I use mine with a usb 2.0 card with my laptop and the external drives are actually faster than the internal drive.

However, there are problems that may or may not be due to LaCie. I have also had an ongoing problem with the drives losing data and being recognized by Windows. After a lot of checking, the problems seem to be simple, yet very destructive. A notebook card protrudes out a good bit over the side of the computer. This has led to ocassional bumps to the card that likely have been the cause of cracks to the bottom of several usb 2.0 and firewire 800 cards. I mention this only to alert anyone who is frustrated by trying to figure out these data losses. LaCie apparently has never encountered this problem. Also, a heavy firewire 800 cable will frequently fall out of the firewire 800 card and that also causes data loss. This data loss theorectically should not be happening, as I have write caching disabled which makes it unecessary to use the "safe removal icon" in the notification area. Whether the loss of data despite write caching being disabled is a Windows problem or a LaCie drive problem is something I have not yet determined. Although I may buy another LaCie drive, that purchase is clouded by the inforgivable lack of information from LaCie. They do have users e-mail addresses and could easily have sent out the firmware update information that is necessary after XP service pack 2 is installed. The reason this is so critical is that the firmware update must be done on a computer NOT using service pack 2. This effectively makes my drives unable to use the firewire connections anymore because I did not find this out until AFTER the XP service pack 2 installation and upon finding that the drives had yet another problem. Basically, these drives can not be counted upon for any data that is not backed up elsewhere, which makes their value very questionable.

Believe the other reviews written by people who have lost data! We bought 3 of these drives and have lost data on all 3. Two worked poorly out of the box (read times of 30 minutes per megabyte across firewire with data access errors). The other one one worked fine for 6 weeks then unexpectedly went belly-up with no recovery possible. LaCie technical support is completely unhelpful. The best warning to everyone is that they post new FIRMWARE updates on their site almost every week. They know they are having real problems with these drives but don't acknowledge it to users. Don't buy these drives unless you want to participate in La Cie's beta testing!

These drives should be avoided.

Our laboratory, and several we work with, have made a big commitment to these drives. We have bought more than a dozen of them. Several times, after working fine for a while, the drive disappears; it does not come up on the desktop. Disk Manager shows it as unallocated. LaCie tech support is not acknowledging the problem. All they could offer was try a data recovery program. I did; it didn't work. We have lost lots of data on theses drives.

I work at a graphics company and we have large files that are stored on our server. Because of budget constraints we bought a couple of 500GB drives hoping to use them for weekly backups of our work. They have been nothing but trouble from the start. Often after properly disconnecting the drives and reconnecting them the drive is read as being unformatted. This has happened multiple times we still have our original data but will not trust the drives as a back up solution. And to cap it all off the service from Lacie is horrible we have called them several times without any real resolutions to our problems.

I have been considering buying this drive for a few weeks now and was about ready to pull the trigger when I read the reviews. After all the research I've done this is the first I've heard that this is actually 2 250MB drives in a RAID 0.

It is totally unacceptable that LaCie does not disclose this fact. I won't bore you with the details but RAID 0 increases your chances of losing data.

There are a variety of folks on the net talking about the "delayed write failed" errors these drives get after a while. I had mine (I have 3) work for almost a year on WinXP before they started crapping out. Now I'm struggling just to get the data off them. And LaCie's tech support is entirely not interested. "You should reformat, that'll probably fix it." Right. Like cutting off my head will cure my headache.

I used to really think LaCie made good stuff...their industrial design is certainly attractive. But their "Big Disk" products are crap, and their support is either abusively indifferent or just nonexistent. I'm hoping I can get the data off the disks and they try to get some use out of them on the Mac, but even there the one disk I reformatted has had recognition problems.