LaCie 1 TB Big Disk Extreme External Hard Drive with Triple Interface ( 300797U )

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review




Read for Power issues and support, October 27, 2008
By I. Sahba (NC, USA)
I have 4 external LaCie drives and I hav e had problems with the power supply. To the people that have returned it to LaCie I must say i am sorry that you were told to do that, if the issue is the power supply they can replace it. I have had to do this a few times and had two very nice tech support and one 16 year teenager who was rude and very bad attitude. In the last case i actually had to talk to supervisor who turned out to be his buddy.
The drives themselves have been OK, but at present two of my !TB and 600GB power supplies are gone out again!



Awesome so far. Great power management abilities..., August 10, 2008
By R. Baker (San Jose, CA USA)
I've seen that LaCie's often get harsh reviews from failures. I've never had one fail on me, and I use external drives a lot! Look, if a drive fails, it fails. I had a Maxtor just die and it hardly had any use. I suspect it was the i/o that died (firewire, usb board) and not the disk itself. So if a drive dies on you, try to use it in another chassis. OK, on to the review...
I have one of these at work, and I LOVE IT!!! You never have to switch it off because it has great power management - it spins down when not in use. I use it as a Mac TimeMachine backup disk. I simply plug it in whenever I want a backup (I'm not a fan of having time machine backup something every hour unless I really need that for certain times).
For me, this drive is fast and effective.
My drives at home, which use generic chassis, I'm constantly reaching around the back and flipping power switches on and off. What a total pain. So I'm likely going to buy one of these Lacies for home.



Totally unreliable. Don't be lured by the price tag., April 24, 2008
By Adam Sevos (New York, NY)
Worked perfectly undisturbed in my workstation for a few months until it started failing transfers, and ultimately becoming completely unreadable. Was horrified to find out common experiences from other people online. Stay away from this item-- better yet from this manufacturer.



Drive failed within 2 months. All data lost. Aaargh!, March 5, 2008
By Sandeep Garg
I had read mixed reviews of LaCie but thought I'd give them a try. Well, my first and last time. The drive started going downhill within a couple of months. First, it wouldn't mount a partition on my Mac, then it wouldn't mount at all. In fact, it wouldn't boot up and made a sing-song buzzing noise. Support acknowledged that a drive mechanism had failed. Very helpfully recommended a data recovery service for which I would have had to pay.

Why can't they make a decent product so we wouldn't have to worry about losing data? My advice: Avoid LaCie drives! There are many others to choose from.



Great, until it died, February 11, 2008
By B. Palmer (MD United States)
I have bought smaller (250gb) LaCie drives for years..., used another 10 120GB for use in a lab at work, and used the 2.5" portable for archiving photos and docs to take to and from work. I've always been a fan of the LaCie drives, until now...

I bought a 1TB drive about 6 months ago, and it died over the weekend. What will the cost be to have a reliable data recovery company take a crack at retrieving the data? $800-$4400!! More if they get a full recovery, less if they only recover some files.

I think the biggest problem with the drive is the RAID 0 design, which means if one drive dies, you lose all. Maybe this should have been obvious to me as a weak point in the system, however the marketing materials don't explain these details... it's a black box system that doesn't reveal the internal config.

I am still dealing with support now, so I don't have the resolution to report yet, but I haven't been impressed so far with my 45 minute wait time to speak to tech support, or a guy who continually yawned at me like I was boring him to death with my sad story of losing about 2 months of work that I'm in a panic about. This guy must have yawned 6-7 times in the 10 minutes we spoke. Comon dude... drink some coffee, or stop pulling all nighters with your LAN party buddies.

If it turns out the power supply is the culprit, which is one thing he said COULD be the problem, I'll be much happier, having had some annoyances for a few days, but recovering the thousands of $$ of time of work on the drive.

Would I recommend this drive? Not any more... Not at the price and reviews I'm seeing from others... I'd go with 2 1TB drives now, striped RAID 1. It's a little more of an investment, but safer, and also time is valuable!

Another product I'm really interested in looking at is the new DROBO product. It's $500 for the device alone, and add 4 1TB dives, and it would cost about $1600 total, but it would give you 1.5TB of redundant and fast storage. The Drobo system allows you to scale the drives up as drives get larger and cheaper, so you don't have to start with the top end drives if you don't like... I have 2 320GB drives I can throw in to start, and then add more drives as the need grows.

Sorry for the ramble... just killing time while I try to figure out what I'm going to do to recover that lost data.