[X4U] LaCie Hard drive troubles

[John Kiss]

On Feb 22, 2007, at 2:05 PM, faramineux wrote:

> 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

My personal experience with LaCie has been horrible. Two drives went  
bad and one only 2 months out of warranty. In both cases, it was a  
failure of the enclosure and not the internal hard drive. I got  
absolutely no help from the LaCie people. Their fix was for me to buy  
another enclosure. I took the drives out and installed them into my  
G4 desktop and trashed the LaCie cases.

A third external drive also went bad. The brick power supply light  
was blinking instead of being on steady. Here I took out the hard  
drive and installed it into my G4 but the G4 wouldn't boot with that  
hard drive in place. It attempted to power up but immediately shut  
down. My take on this situation is that the LaCie case shorted  
something on the hard drive circuit board which prevented the G4 from  
powering up. To verify this, I had an older 15G drive that was in  
working condition that I put into the malfunctioning LaCie case. That  
drive also got fried and had the same effect on the G4.

I'll never buy a LaCie product again. Since then I've bought an  
Argosy case with a Seagate ATA drive and a Mercury Elite-AL Pro and  
so far have been happy.

You'll see many more horror stories on the Macintouch site:

http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/harddrives/topic2190.html