LaCie (300875) 1TB Triple Interface Hard Dr
1 So loud that it is unusable
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.
2 super drive
This drive replaced multiple Maxtor drives that couldn't seem to last more than six months a piece. The LaCie 1TB has been in place for about a year with zero problems. Formatted as one large partition, you'll get about 950 GB, yes there is a loss in overhead just like the same proporation of any drive. 40GB drives usually format to about 38GB anyway, so nothing new there.
Definately get the FW800 PCI card for your machine. It is freakishly fast. Copying tens of thousands of files sized between 1KB and 700MB is quick with no errors.
I don't know if the fans are specifically loud. I have multiple machines and drives and all make noise.
3 doesent even give you 1TB
most of the space is lost during formating
slow and if you try to transfer a giant file, the hard drive gives up before completing
pros:
allows you to show off to friends that you have about 1TB of storage
cons:
loud
slow
too many errors
it seems to make a noise that bothers dogs
i recomend going with the acom data brand
i have one and it has never given me a problem, very fast quiet
no errors
makes your dog happy known that you have a place to store some anime that the dog can use with out being bothered by the noise.
4 Extremly loud fan, just like a server tower
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!
5 Made its money wasting our time.
Lacie are getting the wrong end of the stick from me. The fact that this company refuses to update drivers for old hardware for new versions of an OS is simply a farce in this day and age.
Lacie refuse to develop drivers to support a new OS or even an update. Back in the days of NT they would not even bring out Win2k support for the systems. When XP arrived most of their hardware the year before was simply left to dry up with age.
In short if you buy Lacie then it will only perform to your current system specs. Any changes to the OS and chances are you will be shelling out more doe for new hardware.
CON.
6 super loud fan
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.
7 Cannot copy large numbers of files without errors
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.
