Horrible experience with LaCie RANT ON-Read at your own.....

[proaudioguy]

My Thinkpads have been working flawlessly for many months and had nothing to do with these recent issues, so I wasn't sure where to put this.

Over a year ago I purchased a LaCie Ethernet Big Disc after reading it was a RAID drive in a review.
My goal was to have a backup of the backup available on the network and keep the power bill down. It was the 1TB model and very expensive. Turned out it was 2x500GB Seagate drives in "BIG" or JBOD mode and not user adjustable. That is presumably where the BIG in the name comes from. I needed a NAS drive so I decided to keep it with the intention of replacing it as a backup with a real RAID 1 NAS drive when the funds were available, and use this for a media server only. In June of this year, the line lump PSU failed although I had no way of knowing that until reading it on the internet. The drive would power up, but the HDs wouldn't do anything. It still reads the correct voltage on the right pins, but it makes a hissing sound, perhaps leaking caps. After reading up I found this happens a lot with these LaCie PSUs. Apparently it caused some issues with the controller card. I managed to get a few files (maybe 200GB) off before it finally gave up for good by wiring it directly to a tower PC PSU. I had the option of LaCie replacing the drive but turns out even if the internal drives are perfect, they will erase them and you lose your data. Chances are you just get a refurb in your shell, or maybe completely different, who knows. They just fix em and recycle them back out which goes to show how cheap they really are. I had to go a different route. I considered as a last resort buying another LaCie drive and moving the Seagates over to retrieve the data. Unfortunately this would leave me with a drive with voided warranty to sell off on ebay and I don't need that kind of headache. I couldn't keep it because how can I trust them again? I didn't want to give them another penny so I decided to make this a last resort. Meanwhile during this whole ordeal I needed to replace the backup so I bought 2 Seagate 1.5TB drives and a Thermaltake Muse R-Duo dual drive case. The case can do JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, and Linear (2 sep drives). The case itself was rather pricey, and had not so great speed reviews (RAID 0 eSATA), but since I was going to use it for backing up, I figured I'd give it a shot and I had 14 days to return it if I thought it was crap. Having researched since I initially bought the LaCie, I decided RAID 1 protection was useless if you got corrupted data or someone inadvertently deleted a file. The bad stuff will just copy to the other drive. RAID 0 is useful, but not in a NAS drive over WIFI, and if a drive goes down all the data is lost. JBOD is similarly useless, there is no speed increase and if a drive goes down you lose it all, so I decided to run the new drives in Linear mode and just copy everything to both drives. If anyone else has a better idea, I'm all ears. It's a bit of a hassle, but worth the effort for backing up the family photos, etc. So I wasn't able to recover everything from the LaCie and I only had backups of the photos. They were the most important data I had and irreplaceable so I had multiple copies up to a point. During the time I had access before it died I retrieved the newest photos that had not been backed up elsewhere yet (my bad) so I was good in that regard, and I had the older photos backed up in another location, and the latest and greatest hadn't been backed up yet. I felt I had recovered at least the most important stuff. Still I have close to 500GB in movies from my own DVDs, friends DVDs, my kids, DVDs (all compressed to mp4 for the ipods they all carry), and more than half that in music which I need for work, so I was determined to try what I could to get the data back. I talked to the Thermaltake guys about the possibility of putting the drives in that case and looking at them in Linear or JBOD modes. Neither worked. Windows wanted to initialize the discs. Turns out LaCie boots the drive using a hidden partition with a modified Linux OS for admin. The JBOD raid is also done in the LINUX partition so there was no way a hardware JBOD could work. I was lucky it didn't try to initialize the discs. I googled around quite a bit and finally found a blogger that had the same drive failure (as many folks have), that had figured out how to recover the drives using Ubunto and mdadm (multi disc administrator), which is a software RAID utility that runs in Linux (fyi linear mode=JBOD in mdadm). I installed Ubunto on a spare 60GB on my X32. I was pretty impressed with Ubunto, but there was a bit of latency (think iPhone) that would bug me. Perhaps it's a generic video driver causing that. I spent better part of 6-8 hours trying to figure it out and finally stumbled on the solution (which you can read in my replies to the blog) and recovered over 900GB of data. Once I got the magic combination, the 2 drives loaded in the case in Linear mode showed up as a single 1TB JBOD drive on my Ubunto desktop. I wrote all this because I thought it might be interesting, and also because I wanted to warn you all away from LaCie. I have friends in the same industry on the video side that said LaCie just isn't what it used to be. The reputation they HAD is no longer valid. My friends have failed drives as well. One of them recommended G-Tech for mission critical work. I emailed them and they were quick to answer my questions. If I need another stand alone RAID 0 (G Speed) or RAID 1 (G Safe), I'll be buying from them at least until they sell out for the fast buck like LaCie did. The G Safe allows removal of the drives so the hardware can be replaced without damaging the data. They even make a mini RAID drive (presumably using 2.5" discs). Just google G Tech. I have no affiliation with any of these folks. I'm just a soundman.

Here is a link with some of the information I used to recover my data.

http://www.snorripall.com/recovering-da ... e-big-disk

SO to sum up, LaCie sucks! and.....Don't give up if you want to recover lost data! It took me 3 months (really less than a week of actual work, spread out).

Today I picked up a pair of Thermaltake MAX 4 hard drive cases. They have a large fan that keeps the drives cool almost silently. These are discontinued now but the replacement has very poor reviews, while the Max 4 had good reviews. Newegg has open box versions for slightly less, but Comp USA had them in stock so I went ahead and bit the bullet. They were 49.95 plus tax, which is about twice the cost of a cheapie fan less case. They are not as durable FEELING as a few options at best buy, but were far nicer than anything else Comp USA has in a drive case. I saw some cases at best buy that didn't have fans and were $10 more, but had appeared to have a very well made heatsink. They looked heavy duty. I didn't open it up to see if it was any good since I had already purchased the other cases. The 500GB seagate drives have new homes and they seem happy and COOL, which I think is important to a long life. It would be nice if they had accelerometers too! I am now looking for a PCMCIA eSATA card to use for additional speed with my A31. I'm open to suggestions. I'd like to use it as the media machine in my family room. It has that handy S video out.

[RealBlackStuff]

Interesting post.
BTW, the link with recovery-info didn't make it....

[proaudioguy]

Interesting post.
BTW, the link with recovery-info didn't make it....

Sorry, I not only wrote that rather hastily, I also failed to proof read it. It is what it is.

http://www.snorripall.com/recovering-da ... e-big-disk

Harry

Ps, I posted some replies to the blog which detail what I ended up having to do to make it work. I was using Ubunto 9.x

[Troels]

Great to hear you got your data back. Never really thought of Lacie as anything other than relatively overpriced fancy design with so-so hardware (i.e. no better support than many other competitors).

One thing though - the 2x500 GB Seagates, are those by any chance 7200.11 or ES.2 Baracudas?

[proaudioguy]

7200.11 I believe, it's the SATA version of the 7200rpm drive. It's about 2 years old. Which is better?

[Troels]

By better, you mean as which is least likely to fail?
Seriously speaking there has been a lot of problems with the firmware for the 7200.11 / ES2 which might "brick" themselves at some point:

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/mes ... ad.id=3283

The sad thing is that the first "try" of new firmware for fixing the issues could just as well result in bricking the drive totally. But i guess, since they have worked for so long, there's nothing to be afraid of. They might even have some custom firmware supplied just for Lacie which does not have any issues. That's atleast the case with Seagate's own external drives.

[Temetka]

I've had customer with the 7200.11 firmware bug.

LaCie used to make great monitors back in the day, mostly used for pre-press stuff. I never did like the pricing on their drives, and neither did my customers.

At least the OP was was able to get his data back though.