Lacie Hard Drives Suck

Almost 2 years ago I bought a 500GB Lacie external hard drive for the Peggy Sirota project I did in 07. I had tons of DVDs to rip and then convert to FLV and there was no time to do HD research or wait for FedEx to come without paying an arm and a leg for it. So what is a Mac user to do? Go the the Apple store and ask a few geeks what HD to get. All of the sales people at the Apple store recommended the Lacie Quadra at the time and the 500GB fit the bill then. Firewire, USB and Mac sleep mode.

I ran home, plugged it in and the thing was dead on arrival. Never even booted up. So I had to go back. This should have been my heads up… “get another brand dumb ass” BUT NO, I did an even exchange and off to FLV compression hell. Here I am almost 2 years later and the drive has been working well. I don’t use it often anymore, just to back up projects and photos when the time is available. No fancy time machine or anything.

This week the Lacie failed. I’m sure all drives fail at some point, but again, this has gotten little use. So I’m pissed. I’m on Twitter and Facebook, I need something from a past project and the one time I hit this thing to read it dies. I’ve trashed Lacie all day today. I’ve also done some reading on recovery which adds several days of research at this point looking into a past Macbook Pro HD failure for a friend. I dove back into it tonight for a bit to see if there was anything I could do.

Most people only blog about the bad things that happen so finding other people’s horror stories is easy and sure enough there were tons. Many people said that the power soures fail inside the case and that the drives are still good. I decided to crack it open and I discovered that the drive was a Samsung. Come on people… a Samsung HD? At least a My Book would have a Western Digital HD inside you know? I had expected their own brand HD inside but oh well. After plugging in an older eSATA drive I found out that the power was good and it was in fact the drive.

I had read about this freezer trick so I decided to give it a try. Hard Drives can over heat and warp and freezing them changes the shape of the metal (contraction and expansion… science class remember?). After 20mins in the freezer I plugged in the drive and powered it up. Nothing. I tried 2 more times and wouldn’t you know it… on the 3rd try it booted up!

So now I’m happily copying over my old projects and baby pictures to my laptop and pricing WD & Seagate drives. Should I be hating on Lacie or Samsung though? Both! Samsung for making a POS drive and Lacie for not making their own