Help! Lacie external drive not working!

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  1. #21

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    I haven't taken them out of the cases as such. Just out of the lacie box, which is a completely non destructive process. Now they just look like standard internal HDD's.

    Don't know what the warranty is on a Lacie. I have a strong feeling the serial number will inform maxtor / seagate that they sold the drive to Lacie and it will be down to Lacie to honour any warranty.


  2. #22

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    sounds like you've done as much as you can to isolate the issue.
    I guess cross yor fingers when you call the LaCie service centre.
    Good luck!


  3. #23

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    Thanks.

    I think I will need it by the bucket full.

    Actually, I am not so bothered about getting the drives replaced, it was just the data I wanted back and I know they will not entertain that idea for a second.

    If I could get 1 / 2 / 3 replacement drives I would just see that as a bonus but I am not holding my breath on that score. I recall emailing Lacie support a while back and not getting very far.


  4. #24

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    Let me guess, its a bit of BT involed right?
    99% of the cases such as this is BitTorrent related.
    The read and write load on a drive that saves BT files is alot higher than any normal usage and will significantly decrease the life of the drive.
    One thing to do is to change the setting that ir should save about 20-30mb to ram before writing to the drive, numer of upload slots also plays a role as users will upload different bits from your drive that make the read output higher.

    High load on I/O on the drive = more heat = less life time

    And Lacie cases are quiet famous for heat problems.

    Now im just guessing BT, if this is not the case, well hopefully someone found this post usefull anyways.

    /J


  5. #25

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    Hi JohanSWE

    Sorry to say but no, no BT involved here. I don't think I would use an external drive off a USB port as a place to directly save transfers in any case. Just my personal preference.

    It was my external music drive and also had a few videos on there. I spent a long whiles copying all my CD's to it before I moved over here from the UK - as I didn't want to ship my entire CD collection over here.

    But you do raise an interesting point none the less although I don't think I would quite agree with BT being involved in 99% of all cases of external HDD failure.

    And boy, Lacie's don't half run hot as you say. Perhaps that is fine but they are built to stack - I always worried just how hot one in the middle of a stack would get.

    I used to turn mine off when not in use (which was most of the time).


  6. #26

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    hmmm if its a maxtor drive thats failed i would give you this warning. i had a maxtor drive play up with me for a day and literaly explode in flames burnt the SATA cables and some of the MD (it was in my PC tower) i had only just put it in about a month before (about 6 months ago) so it could be a simular problem....


  7. #27

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    Well i dont know which model you have from LaCie but it is or used to be a big issue with them that they overheat, happend at work before, happend to collegues, and it happend other firms we worked with.
    So i can guarantee you 100% that it is/was an issue.

    And of course 99% isnt BT related i wasnt dead serious, i was just marking a point that BT do cause alot of these problems.


  8. #28

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    I had a three-month old Lacie 250Gb fail earlier this year. It was the second 250Gb drive from Designer Group IFC I've had fail in three months, the first being in a six-month-old G5. I bought the Lacie as a backup after all the headache with having my G5 go down unexpectedly like that.
    The guy in the shop listened to me ranting for a short while, but basically said tough s**t, you can send it off to repair, but you shouldn't really expect a hard drive like this to last for more than a year !!??
    Oh really? Interesting to know.
    Anyone else "back this up"?


  9. #29

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    Wow I should count myself as lucky because in all the 14 years that I've owned computers (and there have been many including Macs) only one IBM drive has failed and that was replaced under warranty.


  10. #30

    Angry "Viagra" Disks run hot!

    Quote Originally Posted by discobay:
    Wow I should count myself as lucky because in all the 14 years that I've owned computers (and there have been many including Macs) only one IBM drive has failed and that was replaced under warranty.


    I go back to as long ago as the "Stiction" Seagate 20 & 40 MB MFM's - where the heads "welded" themselves to the platters - and broke off when restarted after cooling off overnight. {And a secondhand 40 MEGAbyte Seagate co$t $3000 - Yes Three Thousand Dollars in 1984 Dollars!}

    There were no "bolt on" cooling fans then, but now - my 5 HD's all have slim cooling fan assemblies under each one, and have to occasionally be re-greased to ensure almost silence in operation.

    Without forced cooling - it seems that all 3.5" drives get damned hot, and I don't want to have to recover my stuff from over a TByte of storage media that got overheated. :band