Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
This LaCie is great!!!, October 28, 2008
By
M. Deguzman (Chicago, IL USA)
I recently purchased the LaCie 2big Triple 2-Disk RAID Drive. It works great and it is fast. I imported all my videos and pics on it. Doing video and photo editing on it is great.
Hot swap feature is at your own risk, October 26, 2008
By
Dr. G. W. Flake (Redmond, WA)
I purchased this product because it claims that you can swap out a disk and safely rebuild the RAID 1 volume from the remaining disk by adding a new disk. I wanted this feature because I wanted to put a third disk into rotation so that I had an offsite backup. When I started using the drive and trying to figure out how to trigger a RAID 1 rebuild that was truly non-destructive (effectively simulated the scenario where 1 of 2 drives fails, and you want to replace the bad drive) the instructions were oddly incomplete.
I contact Lacie technical support only to find that they explicit recommend against rebuilding RAID 1.
So much for the entire reason for using RAID.
I went with the G-Safe instead, which explicitly supports this capability. Moreover, they give clear instructions for how to use a 3rd disk in rotation for offsite backups.
Wish it had worked better, October 9, 2008
By
Travis Dockweiler (kalamazoo, mi USA)
Got this in a week ago and read the manual and everything FIRST. Set the unit to raid 1 mode and used the reset button. The arrow was facing the correct mode EXACTLY.
Computer boots up and reports the unit as only 1.3TB or something like that. After a half an hour of troubleshooting I would out that the switch is not accurate. I need to put the arrow facing just before the raid 1 option. Obviously a defect.
It's now booting up into Windows and I setup of the partitions and format the drive. So far so good. I benchmark the drive and it comes up as only 65mb/sec over eSATA. Too slow, but for a reason. More on that later..
One drive is blinking and I read the manual about this and that it needs to do a rebuild. It does NOT do this when the computer is off, but only when it's on. The manual says otherwise. Here's what's extremely stupid. It took over 24 HOURS to do a rebuild. You can still access the drive, but in the meantime it limits the drives speed.
Another thing the manual left out is that when you hot-swap something, power to the device needs to be off, otherwise it does the rebuild all over again. Another 24 hours. When the rebuild is taking place, one drive only has an 8gb config partition.
This unit also uses Samsung drives. Not Hitachi, like I read in a review. Probably for the better, but I don't know.
When the rebuild is NOT taking place, HDTACH reports a speed of 95mb/sec, which is pretty decent for eSATA. This is raid 1.
I just had a bad experience with this from start to finish unfortunately. After an hour or two of getting this to work properly, I pretty much gave up with it despite it working in the end. There were so many things about this device that were not explained in the manual.
The positives of this is that the price is decent. I added up the cost of two 1TB drives and an external case and it's about the same, maybe a bit less. I think for Raid 0 only, this drive might be perfectly ok for someone.
The unit appears to be pretty solid and build well. All metal is nice. Can't say I care for that huge light on the front though.
The tech support via email from LaCie was very good. I sent an email on Friday night and got a reply on Saturday morning! Impressive.
I ended up sending this back due to all the hassle of getting it up and running. I went with two internal 1TB drives instead and used my raid card for that. It seems much better and doesn't rebuild a drive just because you disconnected one.
Again, this isn't a bad product. Just a bad experience mostly due to lack of information in the manual. This is coming from someone who has an A+ certification too. If it had this info, I would have saved myself an hour of trouble. I also hated how the switch was labeled wrong for me, wasting more of my time.
Not suggested for raid 1, but for Raid 0, it'd be perfect. I have no problem trying more LaCie products in the future.
Lacie 2 TB triple2, September 8, 2008
By
Michael Hemberger (Niskayuna, NY United States)
Sorry Lacie. I have used your external harddrives for 5 years with no problems. I sent this drive back because it made me sick.The Big blue flashing light is like a strobe light, I tested the drive by loading photos and then pulled one of the drives to simulate a drive failure. The rebuild took 15-24 hours and it kept flashing its 2" blue and red strobe light in my eyes. I had to cover the drive with a black cloth in order to sit at my computer. I returned it and bought a Gardian Maximus from OWC and love this thing. No big blue light to drive me crazy.
I am sure the lacie is fine technically, but if you are sensitive to flashing lights dont buy this drive.
What Happened to LaCie, June 26, 2008
By
F. Plumbo (Indiana, USA)
After two of these drives, both with drive errors within hours of setup, I give up.
You should look elsewhere. Drobo and Western Digital both offer comparable and much less expensive alternatives. They're not as pretty, but they can't be any less reliable than LaCie.
After almost a decade of buying LaCie drives, I'm sad to say that this is typical of their recent history with regard to quality. I've had two other LaCie's fail in the past year and another is starting to make funny noises only a year after purchase. Maybe it's time to stop being such a loyal LaCie customer.
