Big Disk Triple Interface 500GB, 7200RPM, External FireWire 400/800 & USB 2.0 Hard Drive
1 Perfect timing
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!
2 Quiet, cool, fast and reliable
I've used my Lacie d2 BigDisk 500 GB drive for about 6 months now, and have been very pleased. It is very quiet, almost silent. Runs at a good temperature and keeps cool with an alloy case. I haven't had any problems using it with my USB 2.0 connection and Windows XP (service pack 2) as the operating system. Formatted and partitioned it without any problems. It has been a godsend for storing large media files and backing up crucial data for storage off of my network. The drive conveniently shuts down at the same time you shut down the PC. I've read the other reviews and have been surprised at the problems others have had. Then again, I think all hard drives are susceptible to difficulties, especially with heavy use. After many years of extremely heavy-duty computer usage - and after having tried most hard drives under the sun (Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate), I have to say that this is one of the most impressive products I've used.
3 Holy cow, I wish I knew
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.
4 PIECE OF JUNK !!!!
I got this drive today, and it's going back tomorrow. After spending hours transfering my data, I shut down the computer for a while. When I come back, Windows XP CAN NOT FIND THE DRIVE. Then when it does find it, I'm told that it needs to be formatted. I'm luckier than some of the other reviewers, because it looks like I can get my data back using Restorer 2000 and another of my LACIE drives (I own 3 of them, and never had a problem until now).
Oh and I forgot to mention that the Firewire connection never worked. I dont know if it's that particular drive, but I'm not taking any chances. I bought this drive to store personal videos because they take so much space. If I need to also have backup copies on other drives, then what's the use of spending $500 on this ?!
5 Works great on a mac
I have the 500GB drive and use it both with a 1.25GHZ G4 15" powerbook and a dual 1GHZ desktop. It works great with both. It's fast, convenient and reliable. I haven't found noise to be a problem. I've been using it for over 6 months with no issues at all.
6 LaCie BigDisk is trouble
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.
7 A mixed bag
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.
8 Caveat Emptor
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.
9 Very slow response from Customer Support:(
Note: if you connecting via firewire, that this drive will not work after upgrading to WinXP SP2. Requires a firmware upgrade to even be recognised. Luckily I have a PC running XP SP1 which recognised the HD and was therefore able to upgrade the HD firmware. I found this out by chance, it is now 5 days since I called in with this issue to Lacie's tech support and I still haven't heard back.
10 Chokes on Win XP SP2, customer service is lacking
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.
11 400GB lost...
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.
12 Big Disk lost its Partition Info
After some months of reliable operation, I powered up my triple interface LaCie Big Disk 500 gb and it had lost all the partition information. Partition Magic and Norton were no help. Since it wasn't my only copy, I didn't lose data, but it sure make me cautious about relying on this disk again. I was using a Dell and an Orange Micro USB2/firewire 400 card. Both interfaces worked equally well before, and neither after losing the partition.
I'm not sure I could recommend using this drive in any application that didn't have reliable frequent backups on other media.
13 Some Info for Folks Having Problems
I purchased this drive and also experienced the drive disappearance issue. It happened 7 times during the first month I had it. (Somehow or the other, it hasn't happened for the 4 months since then, but I am attributing this to luck and nothing more.) But anyway, when I was having the problem, I was able to recover the drive 6 of the 7 times that this happened. The fact that it happens at all is absolutely unforgivable, but just to help those having this problem: Use a disk utility like PartitionMagic to recover the partition. Here are the steps:
1. Go to Manager (right click My Computer, click Manager). You will probably be presented with an option to write the signature to the "newly-found" disk, i.e. the Lacie drive that has disappeared. Go ahead and write the signature. Close Manager.
2. Open PartitionMagic (I use version 8) and click on what appears to be the blank Lacie drive, and right click to choose Recover partition. (It seems that if you don't go through the process of re-writing the disk signature in step 1, PartitionMagic won't recover the drive.)
As I said, this failed once and I had to spend hours and use some other utilities to get parts of the partition back, so I am not very pleased.
14 So Far, So Good
I have been using three 500GB LaCie drives for three months with no problems. I will need three more within a month and, based on my results with the drives I have, I will purchase LaCie hard drives again. I, too, am interested in the terabyte drives coming out in May, but will probably settle for the Big Disk Extreme drives. I've been using multiple LaCie CD Burners for over a year with zero problems and have a number of clients who are successfully using LaCie monitors. Based on my interactions, I'd have to give their products high marks. I've used their customer service departmant only once, satisfactorily, so I can't comment on the quality of the CS.
15 Western Digital drives in Lacie
It is my understanding that the LaCie Big Disk hard drives use western digital hard (WD)drives...I know that the terabyte model yet to be released has an internal stack of 4x250gb WD DRIVES. I have used WD DRIVES for several years without a hitch and I am waiting with anticipation for the termabyte external hard drive.
16 AVOID THIS DRIVE AT ALL COSTS
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!
17 Drive Fails, Data Lost, Multiple Instances
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.
18 LaCie Makes Great Drives
I own several LaCie Hard Disk drives and have never had a problem with them. I sympathize with the other reviewer who is angry (understandably) over having his disk die on him (I had a HD die on me too, but it wasn't a LaCie), however for him to say that this product is terrible because he was the one unlucky guy this happened to and saying this company won't last is ridiculous. LaCie has been around for decades already!! So they have already lasted! I am running my Mac G4 computer from a start up disk now that is a LaCie and it has been performing perfectly for me for some time now. Don't believe that their products are bad just because the guy who wrote a review before me happened to be the one in a million who gets hit by lightning. 'nuf said.
