LaCie done!

[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.

[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??

[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.