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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

LaCie Little Big Disk Buspowered RAID0 drive with 1TB Capacity

Kaku Ito

Kaku Ito

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I'm pretty sure many of you have already used, but since my RED ONE clients and ourselves think it works great for RED and they came out with new 1TB capacity, LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra 1TB.

We are recommending our clients to use this as a work disk for R3D footage.
 
I have a LaCie Biggest from 2004 and it killed two times the entire content. We had it in Raid 5 mode and no disk died but the controller all of the sudden changed something and we had no access to the content. Since this happend two times it now sits on the shelf waiting for the waste disposal.

As you can see I'm burned by LaCie stuff and don't consider it as "pro-gear".

LaCie's little Big Disk is Raid 0. Please understand that Raid 0 in fact makes a disk faster but also more prone to failure and is by no means an appropriate storage if file safety is of any concern.

Hans
 
That is why I say this is a "work disk". You have to have separate backup some place else and that is the basic. But do you realize RED Drive is the same RAID 0 technology?

However, I have to admit that the AC adapters for larger drives often fails.

So far, every single Little Big Disks' been working well so I wanted to share that despite of some other repair records.

By the way, my video drive with my Mac Pro 8 core is running RAID 6.
 
I would stay away away away from LaCie. I used to buy their stuff because it was cheap... until several disks died on me at once. Then they died yet again when I decided to give the brand a second chance. They always seem to die just a few months after the warranty expires. I now use g-raid. I still have one remaining LaCie 1T drive. We have it on death watch.
 
Sorry to hear everyone's bad experiences. I gave Eric the chairman about the D2's rackmountable idea and he took his own effort to realize it and I thought they were very enthusiastic about making something for creative usage with styles. I actually only like LIttle Big Disk from their product line at this moment and for several months from buying the first Little Big Disk and selling many to customers, so far none has gotten broken yet. I can tell you that much. I will give them the report on the reputation and hope they'll make some improvements in endurance.

Peeps, what are the experiences of WD My Book models? Just hit Japan not too long ago, so I'm not certain about their repair records.

TheThe, I use Sonnet Fusion 400 for single drive backups. They've been working fine. For how I use it, as removables, I'm not certain about the durability of the connectors, though (any SATA removables would be the similar). I also use Enhanced Tech's E8 for RAID6 system. The Japanese importer of Enhanced Tech worked on the fan for me to make it a lot quieter but keeping the drives cool (running around 32 dgree C.). The chassis of Sonnet and Enhanced E8 are made by the same Taiwanese manufacturer.
 
I think the problem with LaCie is that it really is not designed for pro use. The drives are constructed only with 'sales friendly' specifications in regards to price, speed, and storage capacity. But when it comes to reliability they have quite a bad reputation among video folk (I found this out after I had bought everything from them). Right now I have 3 Terrabytes worth of storage just sitting inside of three drives that failed at once after leaving them in storage for a year. No other brand of drives failed that were also stored in the same space.
 
We have 2 laCies - a 320 gig and a Terabyte.

In our experience the 320G laCie (which we used for location back up) has worked flawlessly - after having been very well used and been everywhere from the desert, mountains, lakes, and everywhere in between.

Kaku said it right - the chance of our LaCie failing is about the same as our REDDRIVE failing. And in 6 months neither has failed once :)

I expect the Terabyte version will have been just as effective when we look back 6 months from now.

My 2 yen.
 
Ivan,

We could be just lucky but I think we purchaced when those drives just come out. Maybe that is the ticket for better chances. Hope it will be the same way for our new 1TB drives.
 
Yeah, I am looking forward to see how the terabyte performs. Like I said, if the 320 gig is anything to go by, then I expect the terabyte to perform rather well.

But I guess time can only tell now :)
 
Lacie drives are very unreliable

Lacie drives are very unreliable

Hello,

Here is a snip of a recent message and followup I posted over on Ars Technica about my Lacie woes. In a nut shell, don't purchase their equipment. It's very poor and unreliable. Using them at all is like playing Russian Roulette.

===========
Here is my setup:

Mac Pro
Sonnet eSATA E4P Card
(3) Lacie Quadra 4 terrabyte external RAID 5 Drives
Mac OS X 10.5.4

I've been scanning in a huge archive of negatives and slide scans for the past two years.

Normally I have been scanning using a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED onto an internal drive in the Mac Pro, renumbering and editing, and then copying the contents to two external Lacie Quadra 4 terrabyte drives for backup. The external drives are in RAID 5 (we're getting an LTO-4 soon).

Ok.. here is where it gets fun.

In the last week, I've been rushing to finish an archive of negatives. I was scanning them directly to one of the external quadra drives.

One scan froze and I force quit the application. In some cases, I am still using Nikon Scan, which runs under rosetta (we also use silverfast).

The system felt sluggish. So I rebooted. Upon rebooting, I notice that this drive was not listed.

I look over and see all the lights furiously flashing with disk activity. I go into disk utility and I can't mount it. What the hell?

So I shut down the Mac. Turn the drive off. Wait for thirty seconds. Turn the drive on and wait till it's fully powered. All blue ready to go. Turn on the Mac. The Mac reports that there is a drive that is unreadable, would I like to format.

Oh god. Not again. (I'll explain that in a moment).

So I have three disk utilities at my disposal. Diskwarrior, Drive Genius 2, and Techtools. None of them can get the drive repaired. They report that another utility has erased the drive and it's too damaged to do anything. Another utility reports that the drives "bit 8 is reading unused, but it is in use". And the other just says it cannot do anything.

I load up Data Rescue II. After 24 - 48 hours of scanning, it finds some of the data, but the file names and contents of the files are damaged.

A fellow from Diskwarrior tech support contacts me and we go into iChat and I send him a few diagnostic files. Basically, it's hosed. The data on the drive is gone.

Now I have most of everything backed up on to the other quadra 4 terrabyte drive except for the last 50 pages of scans (a week of work) and four other directories, which I will have to rescan.

My clone program wasn't operating because I forgot to reset it recently.

Why would a drive chew itself like this? It's not the first time this happened.

We had the same type of drive in a 3 terrabyte configuration and I was recording video to it in FCP. FCP crashed during the video record, I force quit and then rebooted the machine. The drive was gone in precisely the same fashion.

That time I sent it back to Lacie as a defective drive. They tested it and sent it back saying that nothing was wrong.

I attributed it to Mac OS X 10.5.3 at the time and perhaps some bad drivers from Sonnet.

It seemed unbelievable that it could happen again with completely new hardware.

I wasn't moving things between drives. They were copies. I've heard about the move issue.

The biggest issue is that we have three of these drives and I feel like I'm walking on thin ice with them.

A fellow from the UK sent me an email:

"I've had two LaCie Quadras crap put on me, both times were after force quitting an app (3D app rendering stills to the Quadra) and rebooting. Friend of mine also had his Quadra die during a Time Machine related "incident".

Data Rescue should see you alright - nothing else would touch my Quadras but even though it was slow and the data was somewhat disorganised, I could've kissed the coders that made Data Rescue. Just be patient and let it run for a few days.

Only external drives that've ever given me problems are Lacie - four complete failures compared to not even a single byte lost on any of my Western Digital or Iomega drives. Would never go near them again."

Bottom line is that I am getting external chassis (probably from Sonnet) to replace these Lacie chassis and giving them the toss.

We're also looking at RAID 5-6 chassis from Cal Digit, Dulce or Sonnet for better options.

Lacie is a very unreliable company. We went through the whole "big disk" thing with them as well. Power supplies that killed drives, poor tech support, etc.

It may have been a good company once, but they are pretty much "done" in my opinion.

Best,

ATF
 
IMO, the fact that Red's RedDrive is Raid 0 does not make Raid 0 as such failure safe. Red's RedRaid needs two disks striped as raid 0 to be fast enough for the intended application. Nevertheless, Red's RedDrive does probably consist of better hardware than LaCies's stuff. Otherwise I don't see why a 360GB Raid 0 does cost more/same than a 1TB Raid 0. I must admit that I only use Red's CF Cards mainly for safety reasons. The only reason forcing me to use a RedDrive is the possibility to record long takes. And frankly, I would never ever fill it up. Imagine you lose 360 GB of data just because someone put down the camera a bit harder. Raid 0 is clearly a decision towards performance but not security. I'm sure that no one at Red would deny this.

Sorry for the LaCie bashing but IMO they build stuff that is not suitable in a "pro" environment.

Hans
 
Too bad they have these reputations all over. Hope they'll overhaul the whole business. I think the concept is good for the LIttle Big Disk (they did it before RED) and hoping someone else besides LaCie makes similar one for those of you won't buy LaCie. I should talk to Yano Electric, they take the QC really seriously.

We are also thinking the new 16GB flash are it. We are so happy that new build and 16GB flash card combination gives us the most in the frame rate/screen size of RED now.

I've been testing Cal Digit and their effort to lead the SATA based system is amazing, few bugs here and there at times but they fix it right away. I have lost everything on RAID with Sonnet before when they had some public beta posted on the net that erased the whole RAID and I wonder how serious they are about making products for storages, but they seemed to fix the software, the current esata card and the software driver are working flawlessly.

I have Areca 1220ML in my Mac Pro with Enhanced Tech's E8 connected, comparing to the early ATTO R380 that suffered the heat from Mac Pro, the combination that I have is very reliable and the quietest possible. It is quieter than Mac Pro running the fans inside at 1200rpm (this way I can run the Mac Pro under 39 degree C.).R380 kept having problems and we realized that the heat sync wasn't appropriate enough to run the card properly.

But the limitation here is the system is not expandable. That is where CalDigit would be so valuable. I only tested the HD Pro and the dual drives (both firewire and the eSATA versions), but the new RAID card that allows you the internal drives and thier HD Element chassis is most valuable system if it works well (haven't tried it yet). I like the idea where you can add extra boxes to make duplicates of whole RAID 5 or 6 and have single volumes in the other box. I assume HD Element system would be good mainly for compressed video work since each box is four bay (of course you can setup over multiple boxes but then that will loose its beauty), then for faster and larger RAID system, they have HD Pro that you can expand almost unlimited. They are more than twice as expensive but the expansion ability is needed for most of us, so I'm looking forward to check out thier HD Pros and the switches. Only down side is that they won't sell their system without more than twice as expensive hard drives.
 
Hello,

Sorry for the Lacie bashing, too. I just wanted to share my experiences with them and for the most part, they have been very poor. It was not always the case like this in the beginning years and years ago, but it seems the norm now. It's really too bad.

===

So how do you like the Cal Digit hardware? I was looking at one of their HD One setups for photograph and video storage. I sent them a question asking if it was possible in the future to put larger drives in the chassis.

Say I buy a 2 or 4 terrabyte chassis now. Can I remove those drives later and put in 1 terrabyte drives to give me 8 terrabytes total? Or would I have to purchase a whole new setup? Obviously this would effect the warranty and service possibilities, but I was thinking a year or two down the line.

Do they put a firmware limit on their chassis?

Our LTO-4 arrived and I am happy to have gotten everything off the Lacie drives. I'm looking at Sonnet Fusion 800P cases to put the drives in, but I need to do some more research.

The Cal Digit RAID card looks excellent. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it when some people can put it through some testing. Their website is nice, but it's a bit confusing and.. verbose (can a website be graphically verbose?). I wish they would have a central area for each product with an FAQ that spelled out the most common questions people have about their products.

Any comments on the Cal Digit hardware?

Thanks much!

ATF
 
TheThe said:
I would stay away away away from LaCie. I used to buy their stuff because it was cheap... until several disks died on me at once. Then they died yet again when I decided to give the brand a second chance. They always seem to die just a few months after the warranty expires. I now use g-raid. I still have one remaining LaCie 1T drive. We have it on death watch.
Click to expand...

Yes, Lacie products are very unreliable. I had half a dozen of 500GB Big Discs. After two years, only one power supply is working (from original 6) and only one drive is "sort of working" wit some CRC errors. This must be the least reliable computer hardware I ever seen.
Their customer support in Australia is poor too. Warranty claims are like pulling teeth out. I would stay away from LaCie.
 
Pawel Achtel said:
Yes, Lacie products are very unreliable.
...
Warranty claims are like pulling teeth out. I would stay away from LaCie.
Click to expand...

Oh, I completely forgot to mention about their tech support. Their first and only priority was to see how I would be not eligible. And they offered no alternative help on how to rescue my data. I ended up having to pay DriveSavers close to $3,000 to get the data rescued (that was for 500 gigs).

This second (and LAST) time around I have 3 terrabytes that have to be rescued. So I am looking at a potential $18,000 rescue fee. Who knew that some cheapy drives would end up costing the same as a Red One. So, is this LaCie bashing? I don't think so. I consider this a Public Service Announcement. DO NOT BUY LACIE.
 
TheThe said:
I would stay away away away from LaCie. I used to buy their stuff because it was cheap... until several disks died on me at once. Then they died yet again when I decided to give the brand a second chance. They always seem to die just a few months after the warranty expires. I now use g-raid. I still have one remaining LaCie 1T drive. We have it on death watch.
Click to expand...

in the past 2 years we had approx. 14 different shape and size of lacie and the failure rate has been 50% ( not too good). Currently we are using glyph drives, so far no failures (approx 11 months).
also these drives are well built (tanks).
 
In Japan, I thought they made mistake by hiring contractor for the support but I was able to get the support directly and got over the problem quick, so it didn't really bother me but man, it's obvious that they really have to rebump their business.

Glyph is custom built professional company so I think they take care of each products they make.

ATF,

We should make a new thread for CalDigit and exchange information there.
 
Here's my 2c... LaCie is actually fine.

Problem is, people on RedUser like buying overpriced expensive stuff - and then they expect it not to fail. That's just not a good idea in the computer world.

IMHO the fancy LaCie solutions are more complex and hence more likely to fail than the simple cheap ones.

I own 9 cheap-as-heck LaCie Porsche drives (been buying steadily since 2003). They were often the cheapest per gigabyte when I checked dealnews, etc. Haven't had a single failure.

I also own 4 or 5 LaCie Triple interface ones. One failed. That's normal.

Also own a bunch of Western Digital, Seagate external drives. Those are good, but the new MyBooks seem a tad flaky. I bought 2 Wiebetech enclosures and they both failed badly. Silly me, I thought because it was more expensive it might be more reliable. At least I learned my lesson.

If you're interested in serious storage for cheap price, buy a PC off Craigslist for $300 with motherboard RAID and fill it with SATA drives.

Or if you want something more "professional" but still cheap, do the research and buy a SATA raid card and an external enclosure.

If you keep your data in three places at the same time you'll usually be fine. I haven't lost anything since 1998. And I have a lot of stuff.

Don't buy a specific brand expecting it to last. Assume that it will FAIL and / or go out of date at some point. This leads you to redundant systems. At that point, price/performance becomes the most important - if you're buying storage for 3 separate backups, $/gb is paramount.

In that case, LaCie is fine, maybe?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
I had a lot of Lacie's of which one collapsed and of which one I do not find reliable. So I decided for Western Digital and these are working fine. For back-up I use very simple and cheap Freecom USB harddisks. Never had a problem with them.
When I complained about the Lacie I did'nt find reliable (strange noises, sometimes disappearing from my screen) I was offered to send it in, but they would not replace it. So I decided never to buy Lacie anymore.
 
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