LaCie done!

[Allen in Montreal]

I am about to but 2 2Terra drives.
For the first time I am not looking at LaCie but at the Iomega Blue series with Firewire 800.

Any thoughts on Iomega vs LaCie?

This change was brought on by the way LaCie treats CDN shoppers.
I wanted to buy a drive for my daughter to take to school.

LaCie USA
500 Gig portable $45.00 usd
LaCie CAD
500 Gig portable $119.99 cdn

So if Iomega cuts the mustard....they get the order for the 2 terra units and all my future drives.

[memorris]

I stopped buying LaCie devices a couple of years ago because I saw the quality and value plummeting. I purchased a NAS drive and it would only stay up for a couple of hours before shutting itself down. Their tch support was no help and after sending it in for repair and having the same issue on return, bought a competitors product and it is still running. After that I had a couple more of their devices with major issues that were never resolved. So I stopped buying their products.

[Jim C.]

LaCie and Iomega are pretty much low end consumer devices imnsho, far cry from
their heyday ( Zip and Jaz drives anyone ? ).
If 24/7 reliability is what you're after without rolling your own drive
then Wiebetech (http://www.wiebetech.com) is a good solution,
I have friends that swear by them but they're going to be $$.

My self I have 5 of the Mini Stack drives from OWC, that I rolled my own,
one purchased with the drive pre installed, of the 6 one completely died,
but it was the case electronics rather than the drive( I think it was the refurbed case)
another the fan was going so it became too noisy to leave on 24/7.
So 2 out of 6 is a good ratio for me.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/

[Bob Kerner]

G Drives here both at home and work. Had some nasty issues with an Iomega at work and won't use them again. I have a Lacie Rugged drive and it's the least rugged thing I own! Actually just a soft aluminum/plastic housing with a rubber bumper. I haven't had any performance issues but the build quality doesn't justify the price tag.

The G Drives on the other hand are built like a tank and in the US carry a 3 year warranty I believe.

[JPlomley]

Just switched to Glyph drives. The quality is second to none. After three Lacie failures in the last four years I'd had enough. I dare you to find a poor review of a Glyph drive.

[msk2193]

Anyone using Drobo?

[Jim C.]

Had a DUH moment, I didn't see the prices in US vs Canadian.
could the Canada VAT make it a 50% price difference ?

[Allen in Montreal]

Had a DUH moment, I didn't see the prices in US vs Canadian.
could the Canada VAT make it a 50% price difference ?

I think it is more the wide spread thought that since get taxed up the Wazoo and say or do nothing, why not charge us with the same philosophy?
Or better yet, both!!
:( :(

We don't call it VAT, we call it GST (Goods and Service Tax) or HST.
HST is Harmonized, where the feds and the province work together at sticking it to you so it lowers their cost to throttle you.

Which, here in Quebec is going up 1 percent Jan 1.
So 5 percent Federally and 8.5 percent Provincially.

When are you guys coming north to give Boston Tea Party workshops? :)

[Allen in Montreal]

Thanks for the suggestions,
my first Gen LaCie (all of 80 gig and that was a Fat Cat at the time) still work today without issue, but the newer ones have such cheap power supply I can't help but wonder.
This was the straw that broke the camel's back.

[Frank Petronio]

The WD consumer level FW800 drives seem to be a good value for simply buying a decent out of the box drive from B&H or Smalldog or online.

I would love to buy those nice G-Tech drives that Chase Jarvis plugs, or the video-rated stacks of RAID drives or a DROBO or something. But for $200 I can get a 2TB FW800 external and load it up, then drop it off on the other side of town for safe off-site storage. That's why I have three and rotate them.

I can only buy 1.5 high-end drives for that same price.

And I agree, LaCie sucks as a company and their housings seem to promote heat and drive failure. Why should I want Phillipe Starke design my drive housing? He made it worse!

[JPlomley]

And I agree, LaCie sucks as a company and their housings seem to promote heat and drive failure. Why should I want Phillipe Starke design my drive housing? He made it worse!

Exactly why I went with Glyph technologies. Power supplies are built in and they actually use professional grade cooling fans. Yes they are a bit louder than the Lacies as a result, but after copying four hours of data from my Lacie to the Glyph, I could have fried an egg on the Lacie while the Glyph was cool as a cucumber. If your interested in the Glyphs Allen I'll shoot you the dealer information here in Montreal. I would encourage you to check out their website and read some of the reviews their as well as the feedback reported at B&H.

[Armin Seeholzer]

I'm happy with my LaCie but the design is by Neil Poulten I have much more fear on my Iomega 1 TB which has the power suplier inside wich gives much heat on the whole housing. Now i made it with 3 feets so it gets more free airflow but still gets f... hot!

Cheers Armin

[Allen in Montreal]

I never felt the need for a very high end raid type back up.
Like Frank, I don't survive off my backup drives.
Everything is burnt to DVD as a double backup and each drive is mirror copied and only used them for rapid access to the most requested files.

Some interesting suggestions, time to step it up a notch no doubt.
I think Lacie has run its course in this house.:p

[Lenny Eiger]

Any thoughts on Iomega vs LaCie?

Allen, DON'T DO IT !!!!

Both those companies represent the absolute worst of the possibilities. This is something I know a fair amount about. I've been building RAID arrays for since the late 1980's.

I suggest you go to pricegrabber.com (or your favorite web price comparing site) and find the best deal on a: "Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS Hard Drive - 2TB - 7200rpm - Serial ATA/600 - Serial ATA - Internal"

Amazon has them listed at $169 US. (1 TB's are $60-100)Then buy a case and put it in there. Or, better yet, if you have the funds, buy 2, (and a 2-bay case) and mirror them. There are many cases on the market, from about $10-15 to about $80. the nicest one I've seen lately is the Icy Dock. The key is that it has the output you need - Firewire, USB 2.0 or Sata - and that it cools well. Sonnett also makes very nice products... both enclosures and external sata cards.

It is way better to buy drives where you know what the actual mechanism is vs expecting a company like Iomega to put something good in there. Even Seagate and Western Digital sell external drives at Costco, but many folks say they last about a month or two. They are likely refurbs or some lower quality run - stay away! If you buy the drives yourself, you save a fortune, and you have a warranty. If you mirror them, you can be very safe...

Lenny

[Photomagica]

I keep it simple and buy Vantec Nextar Hard Drive Docs. These are e-SATA devices that accept a raw hard drive. Cost is less than $50. I use Seagate 7200.12 1T drives or WD Caviar Black. I simply shove in the raw drive, power up the Dock, the drive mounts and I'm good to go. Got two more of the 1T Seagates on Boxing Day (here in Canada) for $39.99 each. I keep one copy of everything in the computer and then a minimum of two copies on hard drives stored securely elsewhere. The drive dock makes it so much easier to keep up with the backups than any arrangement I've used before. Speed is dramatically better than Firewire.

I abandoned Raid arrays after having one whole array fail for reasons that weren't apparent - one destroyed drive and garbled data on the rest.

Cheers,
Bill

[toyotadesigner]

I'd recommend a WD MyBook Studio 2 TB. You can connect it via FW 800, eSATA (screamingly fast), or USB (slow).

I'm running a Studio 1 TB for 3 years now and added a 2 TB later. Same case, different 'fronts', no problems until today (connected to an iMac).

In the past I've had only WD drives and experienced them to be extremely reliable. However, don't install the WD tools if you are on a Mac - they'll prevent the standby mode.

[Bodyslam]

I keep it simple and buy Vantec Nextar Hard Drive Docs. These are e-SATA devices that accept a raw hard drive. Cost is less than $50.

I abandoned Raid arrays after having one whole array fail for reasons that weren't apparent - one destroyed drive and garbled data on the rest.

Cheers,
Bill

Like Lenny, I prefer to buy raw drive mechanisms so I know what quality I'm buying. Having seen the insides of many brands of drives, I have confidence in Seagate and Hitachi/IBM.

Like Bill, I just use a dock. After the first Vantec failed in the first hour, and the second Vantec failed in the first month, I went looking for a dock that's a little beefier. Of course Wiebetech makes some, but they're expensive. I found one called Voyager from NewerTech that's cost-effective and well built. Six months and counting, it's still working flawlessly. It has FW400, FW800, USB2 and eSATA connections.

Also like Bill, I have had some unhappy experiences with RAIDs, so avoid them, except as a Photoshop scratch disk.

[ic-racer]

value plummeting.

Digital hardware has value?? :D

[neil poulsen]

I've had three LaCie products, and I've had problems with all three.

My LaCie CRT monitor gave out early, because the red gun went bad. So, I used it for our family computer, and soon the image started doing weird things. Off to the recycle bin.

I have a LaCie drive that works OK. But, the connection to the AC adapter doesn't make a good connection.

I bought a floppy disk 3.5" drive for my Mac, and the drive pretty much failed right out of the box.

No more LaCie for me.