We have lots of disks. Four of them are LaCie. Last month, two broke down. I had them fixed 'out of warranty'. Expensive and long. I was upset. A week ago, a third one goes. Note that we were about to buy to 2Tb RAID sets. I send an email. I'll make the story short. They have agreed to simply replace my third disk. They even shipped it before seeing mine. In my books, that's pretty good service so I wanted to give them some kudos.
PS. We're buying those disks now.

Yeah, sounds par for the course. I've got LaCie external disks (and a DVD?RW) and their service has been outstanding.

Outstanding service to make up for a bad line of product. They had some SERIOUS issues with their low cost external RAIDs. It has been fixed but the problems were widespread. I had several units fail, some within days and when I hit the net I saw that EVERYONE was having issues. Luckily they new stuff is top notch but they scared off a lot of people.



ash =o)

LaCie sources parts from a variety of manufacturers (WD, Maxtor, as well as various interfaces), so it could be (and likely is) something that was delivered to them that failed. Ultimately their name is on the product, but they do stand behind what they sell. Yeah, they have problems, but they also fix them. That says quite a lot, at least to me.

Ok...so their customer service is good.

But doesn't the fact that 75% of your drives failed say anything to you?

They have great customer service because they had to save face. Check the CNET reviews of the 250gb external:

http://reviews.cnet.com/LaCie_d2_Hard_Drive_Extreme_with_Triple_Interface_250GB/4852-3186_7-31116431-2.html?tag=nav

Check Amazon for the 500gb:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/B0001PFO5U/ref=dp_nav_1/104-2281829-7780703?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=172282&s=electronics


The LaCie Big Disks failed at an abnormally high rate especially for PC users. Myself and others will never ever go back to them. I would not trust my data on their drives ever again.



ash =o)

But doesn't the fact that 75% of your drives failed say anything to you?
Agreed. But I might add that we've owned LaCie equipment for about ten years now. In fact, we have two of their LaCie Blue monitors that have never shut down since being purchased in 1999. Actually, we shut them down when we moved our studios in 2003; but never since. I might also add that in the past ten years, I've had several other hardware failures with other manufacturers. All this said, I'm not dupe. I do realise that 75% failure rate is high but in our business, so long as you have backups, customer service counts for alot. So, in closing, considering their quick response, I'll continue to back up religiously, operating in RAID 10 to have both speed and safety but will give LaCie a second chance.
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Just looked at the Maxtor drives. Nice too. Hmm. Maybe we'll try the LaCie biggest drive vs. the Turbo Maxtor and see how each holds up. I'll order both, use them on our next film and post back in a few weeks.

We have lots of disks. Four of them are LaCie. Last month, two broke down. I had them fixed 'out of warranty'. Expensive and long. I was upset. A week ago, a third one goes.

how long was the warranty period? most external hdd boxes are only covered for one year.

if you had purchased the hdd's seperately, you'd be covered by a five year warranty, depending on the drive manufacturer... just mount 'em in a box with a fan on it.

i would not be buying maxtor if i was you, i had one go out in less than a month.

I'd pass on the Maxtors if I were you. Lost a 160 and 200 (luckily pulled the data off the 200 before it finally crapped out). Their quality has bottomed out sibnce they went to a 1 year warranty. MY Seagate replacements are much quieter and have a 5 year warranty.
Hope this helps.
Ken