This Much I Know

You’re lucky. You seem to be the only person LaCie’s support have ever actually supported when it comes to this problem, and it’s a problem with more that just your model drive. They got horrible comments on Amazon for their shoddy support, to go along with their shoddy drives.

13 months after purchase, my Bigger Disk Extreme (the big brother to your drive) just stopped working. Very obviously, the power supply failed. I emailed their support and was told to basically suck it up – no warranty, no fixee.

760 gigs of data gone splat without so much as an apology. I actually have backups, but on top of the cost of a new drive, it’s going to take days to reload literally hundreds of CDs and DVDs.

This much -I- know: in all my fruitless searches, you’re the only person to get a positive response from LaCie support.

I’ll never buy a LaCie anything ever again, and as a Mac admin, no company I work for will either.

Hi Joe,

Very annoying that they were so unwilling to help. Which country are you in? Maybe the UK support line have a different policy, as it was the UK I contacted.

It certainly has put me off buying them again, even with the very helpful customer support. I had a similar problem years back with a Syquest EZ135 removable disk drive – their follow-up to the original Syquest drives – where the power supplies kept failing, even though the removable disks were fine. Not just me, either, and sadly Syquest are no longer with us.

Question is, who do make hard disks you can rely on?

Hi I have a Lacie 500GB bigdisk extreme firewire 800

It apparently had the PSU problem and after 3 Psus and 3 days after the warranty expired ,

Ii decided to take it apart and have a look.

it uses 2 250gb Matox ata 133 in a raid stripe 0 config.

Right so now it was out of the oven , sorry I mean casing i tried them on the bench with a fan on them .
They worked fine no problems , ok back in the casing , they worked for about 5 mins then started clacking .
take them straight out of the casing again add fan worked ok !!

right take a close look at the discs .
Take them into the lab at work a check the controller boards , low and behold one of the QFP ( quad flat packs ) surface mount devices had no less than 18 dry joints
( ie the solder joint between the pad on the pcb and pin of device is cracked and causes intermittent failures – especially when hot )
SO I fixed these ,
I also drilled holes top 100 holes top and bottom on the lacie case to allow air flow through it and it all works fine ,
5 months on I have now put 2 500gb seagate barracuda drives in there ( as they run a lot cooler than the maxtors) abd I have a 1TB lacie drive with no problems and very quiet too .

I hope this helps somebody

oh PS
if your discs do spin down , you will need to run a full scandisk as bad sectors are created – i.e a write failure .

Martin,

When you replaced the drives did you have to do anything to get the disks back into a raid 0 array? Is it automatic? One of my big disks is failing and I need to change the drives but am not sure what would happen.
Any advice would be appreciated.

Same issue with my 500 GB Drive. Power cord is bad but drive is ok.I will try the support claim. Tx

I’ve had same problem with a 320gb Big Disk – PSU died and they sent a replacement within warranty, but that too failed.. haven’t bothered with that drive since.

Stupidly, I then bought a 2TB Bigger Disk Extreme and that too has suffered a fried power supply after just a couple of months.
They sent me an advance replacement after I complained to SALES that their tech support were ignoring me (after 3 days of not receiving a response to the original support ticket AND a follow up), and that worked.. for about 8 months…
Now that replacement PSU was starting to act a bit funny, drive was working, then kept disappearing… so I ordered a replacement PSU in advance just in case, as I knew what support was like.

New PSU turned up on day that existing PSU died a death.. only to find that the new PSU doesn’t work either…. drive spins up, spins down, spins up, spins down.. take USB out – blue light stays on.. plug USB in, light blinks rapidly and system doesn’t see the drive.

occasionally it will spin up long enough to be recognised by system.. but then, any access to the drive to copy my latest work off it kills the drive again.. so it’s as if there isn’t enough power to support the drive.

I now have TWO dead PSU’s within warranty, and 2 “drobo” units that I’ve bought to replace Lacie drives.. filled with 4x 1.5tb drives each..

I will never touch a Lacie product again.

Ditto here. I bought a 1TB LaCie d2 Big Disk back in February 2007. Last week I was no longer able to access it. There’s a faint whining and clicking sound when I try to power it up and the blue light on the front blinks dimly. I purchased a new power supply from LaCie this afternoon as well as a 1TB Western Digital drive from Amazon. Hopefully the LaCie power supply will last long enough for me to get the data off LaCie and move it to the WD.

I’ve contacted LaCie in hopes that maybe they’ll send me the power supply and refund me the $19.99.

I’m a little gun shy now about using LaCie drives.

[...] search results, to see if I’d missed any golden nuggets of information, until I got to this: LaCie Big Disk spinning down unexpectedly, which said: “This is actually a problem with the power supply of these units, rather than [...]

I’ve had no end of grief with LaCie drives.

The problem is down to the rubbish power supplies – cheap Chinese/Taiwanese crap, mostly made by Sunfone.

Replacing the power supply solves all the troubles, bar one…

Overheating. The simple answer is to put the drive and PSU on the floor with some reasonable air space around them, then they won’t overheat – they’ll get hot, but not too hot.

I’ve had a lot of people complaining their LaCie drive has died, I hook up a *decent* (non-LaCie) PSU and it works fine, their PSU, the 12V line reads 9V and the 5V line reads 4.2V a new PSU from LaCie does the trick for about 14 months, after which, it fails again.

Simple answer, don’t buy LaCie drives.

A question for Dave…

I too have had numerous problems w/ LaCie AC adapters – both at home and at my office. I have contacted LaCie many times and have always been told to purchase another adapter.

They never seem to still be under warranty when they go . And of course the new adapter always resolves the problem.

In the last year I have had to purchase four new adapters for LaCie drives being used for personal purposes and I have lost count at the office.

The “office” happens to be a major book publisher where I am the Macintosh Client Services Lead Analyst. Despite my stating we will be selecting another manufacturer for our external drive needs if the poor quality adapter issue is not resolved I still get the same response.

So my question is in your comment from November 16th, 2008 you stated, “…hook up a *decent* (non-LaCie) PSU…”

Any chance you could clarify this? If such an item is available it would be great to know what, where, etc.

Thanks in advance.

It seems most of you have had failure due to the power cord. After testing power to my 500 Gig Big Disk Lacie, we found the failure was power on the board inside the case. Can I purchase just that card? The one with the power jack and raid.

[...] found that it’s not a rare problem, and after reading this article, I stuck my multimeter on the power cable and found they were both barely putting out 11V, 1V less [...]

I have a power supply problem with my Lacie 500gb drive (edmini). If I put a test meter between the casing of the drive to earth (UK) I get 125VAC. (UK voltage is 230V +/- 10%.) I first realized the problem when I got a shock between my PC casing and the drive casing. I disconnected the PSU and found the 125VAC was seen between pins on the low voltage lead and earth (UK).
I would assume that the circuitry has broken down inside the PSU and made a connection to the High Voltage side which I would say is very dangerous.
I have put a ticket into Lacie but similar to every one elses comments, replies are very slow and they are telling me otherwise. Maybe I should give trading standards UK a go? By the way the drive works intermittantly, which is again down to the PSU.

And I thought I was the only one! I have bought four Lacie drives and am now on my third PSU problem. Lacie (UK)support has ranged from deeply unhelpful (essentially sod of and die) to replacement of PSU’s with a long delay in receiving it.Where can I get alternative power supplies that are more reliable?

Wow!! I bought a Lacie 301301U 1TB external hard disk about July 2008 because it was on sale. I did not need it at the time. But yesterday (Feb 13, 2009) I opened the shrink wrap and attempted to back up my data. It worked fine for 5 minutes and then kept powering off and on every few minutes on it’s own. My concern is that with hard disk drives even if they are repaired, it is very anxiety provoking to be unsure whether or not the drive will work when you need the backed up data. I did not phone Lacie, but have written to them. And hope that my experience is not the same as everybody else here. Or at least I am keeping my fingers crossed to get a decent replacement. Scary, to spend so much money and then get an unreliable piece of technology.

Replacing the power supply unit (PSU) solved my problem. Failure: LaCie d2 Big Disk Extreme 500 GB. Symptoms: ‘click of death’; could read, but unable to write anything more than a few small files – the drive would click, spin down and then Finder would report an error; prolonged startup with blinking blue light. TechTool pro 4.6.2 reported read/write ‘passed’, but found 8 bad blocks. Solution: Backed up data by creating compressed disk images of the partitions on the disk using DiskUtility. Zeroed out the drive to eliminate the bad blocks. Replaced defective 37W PSU model no. ACU034A-0512 with new 57W PSU no. ACU057A-0512 (About $25 US in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia). Recreated partitions and restored data from the disk images using DiskUtility. The disk is now working normally, has zero bad blocks. All data restored and all symptoms resolved.

I have a Lacie Big Disk on Ethernet. Has anyone had the problem of the dive vanishing from the network. Blue light is on steady. No blinking or flashing. Turned power off then on and the light just comes on steady. Drive seems to be dead. Check voltages on PS; 12.9V and 5.3V no load. (12.9 seems high for a regulated supply). Been getting assistance from Lacie tech help. Tried the rest procedure they suggested but did not work. Can I remove the Drive and see if it will work in a PC?

I bought a 2TB external drive on 10th March 2009, after 2 months and sending it away twice for repair , them not repairing it and sending it back they’ve now told me the warranty is void because I didn’t pack the drive well..

I’ve not even managed to have it for a day, it’s been in their repair center or en route to another drop off site…

They are are just useless – I will not be buying their products again..

If you want a full transcript of the crap I’ve put up with in the last 2 months from Lacie and their excuses , you can e-mail me at gregrussell@hotmail.co.uk

I just can’t believe this! Same experience… I smell a class-action lawsuit coming on. I’d have to say they might deserve it.

I couldn’t turn on my Lacie 320GB Porche design, I’m not sure whether the power button or the power supply unit is the problem.
I’d like to try with the power supply first while waiting for Lacie support man to reply … finger crossed.
To DBM, please advise where you bought the power supply unit in Riyadh as I’m new here.
Thank you.

Hmhm….really annoying. If I would have searched slightly longer before trying on my own to “repair” my drive, I might have made some better decision.
Anyway: For the sake of informing other users from bad experience, here’s my story:

I had a 1T Lacie Big Disk (USB, 2xFW800, FW400) for about 18months now. It worked very well until all of a sudden, the device stopped working: when I plugged in the power supply, it would start to blink (the yellow LED on the PSU not the blue one on the disk). Since the drive never even started to spin, I thought, that the problem is most likely either the PSU or the controller on the disk. I then replaced the PSU with one from another Lacie Disk -> same result, the LED starts to blink when connected.

I then contacted LACIE what to do about the problem: I wanted a replacement of the disk/controller/or whatever was wrong because I purchased my product with 3 years of warranty. However I did NOT want to loose my data at any price. The answer from Lacie: “Yes, we might replace your drive, however we will not return your data”. Meaning: you send it in, they throw it away and send you a new one without your data. great.

In my dispair, I thought: hmhm…can’t be that difficult to read the data from the two disks, if I get hold on another LACIE Big Disk that allows me to replace the HD’s inside with mine. So I went to the store, bought a brand new Lacie BIG DISK (2T, since it was the only one on stock). Then I wanted to replace the two disks -> result: unable to read the data!! when plugged into my Mac, both disks start spinning, but then after a while a message appears “Unable to read medium, do you want to initialize it?” ((
I also tried swapping the two disks, to make sure it’s not just that the position of disk1 and disk2 are reversed in the new model…
So I belive they somehow changed the Firmware or the way they deal with the RAID0 in this new model…and that the controller is unable to read from the old drives….

Well. So I’m now sitting on a brand new LACIE disk without warranty (because I opened it to replace the HD) together with an older LACIE disk that won’t work and that now is also without warranty and two potentially fully functional HD’s (Seagate) out of the first BIG disk with all my data that I really really want to retrieve….

Arggggg!

Any suggestions are welcome for help!

In the mean time, I will have a look at the controller as suggested by Martin Morgan in post #3.

mat

Mat, I have the same problem as you. I have a LaCie Ethernet Big Disk (A) 1TB. One day I’m moving some files onto it and it just stops. I power it down (does it piss anyone else of that these things don’t have a switch on the back?) and start it up again. It runs OK. It looked like just a loss of network connectivity. I start moving files again. It dies again. I try resetting again, this time when it comes back up, the blue light is slightly flickering, and no familiar wind-up sound of the drives. Bugger!

So it’s just outside warranty (Murphy gets me again). Since then I have tried accessing the drives from multiple machines, Windows XP, Mac OSX, Ubuntu Linux etc. I bought a SATA to USB2 connector and used that. No operating system understands the partitions. They can see them but not mount them.

Just recently I got hold of SpinRite. I created a bootable DVD, and plugged both the drives from the LaCie onto the PC mainboard via SATA. I then booted from SpinRite. I let SpinRite do it’s thing. It inspected all partitions, took about 7-8 hours to do both drives. The result – no errors – nada, nothin’, zilch, zip. No ECC errors, no sector errors, no nothing – the drives appear perfect.

So I start thinking it must be the mainboard in the LaCie housing, or the PSU. I tested the PSU this morning, and it seems fine. Multimeter shows ample voltage on the 12 and 5 volt pins without load.

So I’m down to thinking the mainboard is dead. Now I’m looking around for a replacement.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to keep this stupid device. I just want my data. I have family photos, home video, our freaking wedding and honeymoon on this thing. Photo’s of the kids growing up. I’m spewing!

LaCie have been as unhelpful as a company could possibly be – there is absolutely no way I will ever buy or recommend LaCie products again. In fact I will go out of my way to warn people away from them. If I see someone in a store looking at a LaCie product I will interrupt them and tell them not to bother. You can’t imagine for my dedication to this.

So what I want to know is if ANYONE ever has been successful at getting their data off one of these RAID0 striped drives – by any means? Is there a place online I can voice this with others. Getting my data off is not negotiable – it must happen.

Thanks for the article Dave – it’s interesting how you positive experience has attracted the negative ones.

I wish you all the best of luck. If anyone wants to get in touch please email jackofit [at] gmail [dot] com.

Covered under consumer law in UK
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/bargains-and-rip-offs/tips-and-guides/article.html?in_article_id=487339&in_page_id=53954&in_advicepage_id=131

Type your comment here.I have had my Lacie duplicator for 2 years and have never had a problem like I am experiencing now. I replaced my disc drives and to know avail I cannot get it to work anymore!! Need help!!

This is a good site for quality comments. I’ve always been cautious about reading stuff on comments boards, for fear of it degenerating in a social network club!

The info here about the LaCie disc is also my experience and I’ve learned good stuff today. If I find a way of access the data currently now available on my LaCie BigDisc 320g, I’ll post my method here.

Thank

Many thanks for a very useful forum. I am about to do battle with Lacie now I am armed with a lot of good information. My drive isn’t dead! It’s the power supply. After borrowing the supply from another Extreme I can now copy a 15 gig file in 7 minutes not 22 hours!!! Can’t face dealing with the illiterate online online ’support’ team yet again! May try and telephone number.

Update – I now have a new power supply! I had finally had enough of dealing with the online team. So, I raked around on the Lacie website and found a telephone number, I think it was sales (always call sales numbers, they are less like to be in the depths of Asia, and they have more of an obligation to represent their company well). Anyway, after a short heated ‘discussion’ during which the lady suggested I go and buy another and me telling her that they would be replacing it she hung up, but just after spitting out, “I’ll put one in the post tomorrow”… There you go. So nice to deal with such a customer centred company. Go for it!