Don't Buy LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Drive
I see a lot of Mac users with LaCie External Hard Drives. I know that they have been used and relied on by many, and I had the overall impression that the quality of LaCie Hard Drives was excellent… until this thing.
I was using a personally-owned Western Digital MyBook hard drive with Time Machine on my work computer. It has been working fine for a long time other than the fact that it is very slow. I have had it for about 3 years, and spent almost an entire year working directly of of it. Well, it is not exactly the highest performance drive and it was aging (plus it was not that big). So I convinced my boss to buy me and the other Mac users in my workgroup nice, external hard drives for to use with Time Machine so that we could all have our backups… Approved. Awesome.
I ran across the d2 Quadra (SKU# 301442U). It is a 1TB drive, and has several options for the interface (eSATA, Firewire 400/800 and USB2.0) and included cables. It was $179. I have been seeing several “bargin” external drives going for $100 or less so I figured if I wanted the better perfomance, higher-quality drive with the multiple interfaces, we should go for the LaCie d2 Quadra.
The guy that buys everything for us bought abot 20 of them from buy.com and they came in relatively fast. When I opened them up they looked very well designed, and I set it up immediately to start my Time Machine Backup. Seemed to be going fine. That night, a colleague of mine let me know that his drive was acting funny. Well, I wasn’t sure what the issue was, but decided I would take a look at it in the morning. Turns out that the thing was dead. mechanically, the drive was dead. It wouldn’t do anything except make terrible noises when it was powered on.
So, we got a bad one. No big deal, these things happen, right? Mine was still working OK… So I go to find the guy that bought them and tell him that we need to return one because it is broken. Meanwhile, on our way over to the see it, another person in our group sees us as says that her drive is dead too, and making weird noises. Good thing he had only given one to the three of us so far.
OK… so we check the serial numbers, and they are all very close together (all three of ours were only 5 numbers apart). So, we find that we have one that is about 1000 different and she sets up to try that one out. This time a couple of days go by before the inevitable.
So, let’s recap.
2 dead within 24 hours with a third another 48 hours later or so. Mine and my other buddies’ replacement were still working, but I noticed mine started making a loud and odd click when I ejected it. Great. Needless to say, we are boxing up the ones we have open and sending the whole lot back. Unfortunately, being that we all work in government, the 3 that failed, we cannot even return because there is the possibility that there is sensitive data on them and they will have to be destroyed.
LaCie, What Happened?!?!
If anyone has a suggestion for a GOOD, high performance external hard drive, please let me know. I am currently looking at the following as replacements:
- Fantom Drive’s G-Force Quad Interface
- http://www.fantomdrives.com/products/gfquad.htm
- $119 on MacMall.com right now for the 1TB version
- Seagate FreeAgent Desk for Mac
- http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/hard-drive-mac/Free-Agent.html
- $165 on MacMall.com
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