[X4U] LaCie Hard drive troubles

[faramineux]

I have 5 or 6 LaCie Firewire external drives. From 500 to 125gb. They  
have been OK until one of them is now giving me some grief. Suddenly,  
out of the blue it won't be accepted: The dreaded message arrives -  
Do you want to initialize this drive? I called LaCie and they showed  
me how to repartition the drive: Choose one partition and called the  
drive by a name I have never used before. It worked for a week. Then  
same problem. Called LaCie and the tech person told me that I should  
NOT use the drive in a daisy chain, etc. He says the data must be  
corrupted but the drive is sound. Needless I no longer trust that  
drive. What do you make of it? By the way this is a drive that has  
800 and 400 Firewire outlets. I use the latest version of Mac OSX. TIA