Comments on: LaCie Big Disk Extreme Failure

By: Stewart

Stewart — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:11:22 +0000

Well, haven’t I been here before? Bought LaCie 1Tb about 20 months ago. 11 months ago the power supply failed. Sent it back under warranty to receive new power supply and all data still intact. Thank god. Now nine months down the line, the power supply (I hope) has failed me again.
As the actual HDs are now outside the warranty I took the brave step of opening it up, buying a SATA docking station and trying to access the data via that.
Not straight forward as the disks report as RAW format due to the RAID setup, so I’ve had to spend money on the right data recovery software that can read, copy and convert RAW to NTFS to transfer to a new 1.5Tb internal HD.
In all honesty, even if I do get another power supply from them I don’t think I’ll bother using it. Instead I’ll just reclaim what I can from each 500Gb SAMSUNG drive, reformat them and then dock them periodically to create offline backups of my more important data.
It’s not that LaCie are malevolent, they’re just incompetent at producing reliable hardware for today’s digital mass storage requirements. No more for me thanks.
On a lighter note; how many light bulbs does it take to change a philosopher?

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:08:33 +0000

Had a failed 250GB drive which I could not access. After reading this board and others I tried the “freezer” trick, which did not work. Then I tried swapping the Lacie covers/chassis with a working drive of the same size/model and was able to successfully access my data. From this I can conclude that the Western Digital HD was fine, but the Lacie chassis failed. I will not be buying Lacie Drives in the future.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:24:31 +0000

I bought a fleet of 8 LaCie 500 GB drives for disk-disk backup at work and most died for various reasons over three years. And these drives were typically only accessed once per week. Usual power supply problems people had, but other problems as well. I replaced these lemons with Seagates (that came with 5 year warranty) and have had no problems since. I will never buy a LaCie product again.

By: claytron

claytron — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:05:13 +0000

Thank you for for this solution! I had the *exact* same symptoms and buying the new power supply has me back up and running perfectly, and backed up to another drive as well

By: DBM

DBM — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:41:06 +0000

Replacing the power supply unit solved my problem. Failure: External FW LaCie d2 big disk extreme 500 GB. Symptoms: ‘click of death’, bad blocks, write failure, blinking blue light, unable to write any large file. TechTool pro 4.6.2 indicated tat read/write was OK, but disclosed 8 bad blocks. Was able to zero out the disk to eliminate the bad blocks and recreate partitions using DiskUtility. Nevertheless, symptoms persisted. Was able to create disk images of partitions (TimeMachine, ClonedHD, other). Replaced defective 34W LaCie power supply unit model No. ACU034A-0512 with 57W unit model no. ACU057A-0512 (About $25 US in Riyadh, Saudi arabia). All problems resolved. Restored partitions from disk images with no difficulty. OS X 10.5.6. Imac early 2006, 2GB memory. FW 400 connection to LaCie Disk.

By: DavidS

DavidS — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:51:18 +0000

I’ve just had my LaCie 200GB drive fail. The disk justs stopped spinning. I was advised to try a different power supply, so I’ve ordered a replacement from LaCie. I’m encouraged by what I’ve read from others that often the issue is a power supply failure. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I bought a Seagate 1Tb for use as a backup disk and bought another LaCie disk (a d2 Quadra 500 GB) for external storage, to be backed up along with the internal drive on the 1Tb Seagate. I think if I’d read the reviews first, I wouldn’t have bought a LaCie for the second drive. Too bad. I *had* always thought that LaCie was a great company. The 200GB drive that failed was almost four years old. I’ve never had problems with it before.

By: jay

jay — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:03:23 +0000

Lacie Big Disk Extreme here, 2 months out of warranty. Started crashing after sleep and not mounting at all. I borrowed power supply made all the issue go away!

By: Cameron

Cameron — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:27:25 +0000

Follow up note to the solution to my problem. I ended up searching ebay and finding the precise model I had and ordering it. I then used this for parts. In my case the controller board and power supply were bad. I was able to restore it, but had to update the firmware on the new board first. So I ended up spending $250 to recover my data and ended up with 4 nice SATA drives which will be the beginning of a new high quality RAID 5 NAS… Any brand but Lacie of course. Hope others are as lucky as I was! Good luck.

By: John B

John B — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:34:52 +0000

If you power supply is gone, you can get both genuine replacements and “equivalent” from Ebay at the moment.

They both are priced around 30, so I would go for the genuine ones. I bought one and they brought my drive a live, with only minor repairs to permissions needed.

By: Cameron

Cameron — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:22:36 +0000

My problem is that my 1tb big disk stopped responding. Then when I tried to restart it would not power back up. After way to much back and forth they sent me a free power supply under warrenty, and it still does not power up. Waiting for a response from tech support, but I’m sure whats next is sending it in, which I will not do until I get the data off… (I never intend on using this again even if it was repaired) So my question is does anyone have anyway to recover the data off of these drives which I suspect are still fine? I’m guessing the controller is the problem, but have not opened the case yet until I hear what Lacie has to say. Has anyway had luck connecting these drives to a pc to recover data? Pretty concerned since I understand it to be RAID 0…