Oh no... not my LaCie drive!

Okay, I have been known to be a supporter of LaCie drives. I've probably worked with 50 different drives of all flavors and sizes, and I've seen about 3 go down for good.

Well I just so happen to have a 1.6TB Bigger Disk Extreme with an HD feature on it that is starting to act up. I started noticing that I was getting noise in my render files, then FCP kept giving me errors when I tried exporting QT movies.

I noticed that even on the finder level, sometimes clips would open in QT, sometimes they would be grey, and sometimes they'd just display an error.

The drive is only a little more than half full, and it is about a year old.

So I went out and bought some G-Raid drives, and RAIDed them together so I have about 1TB of space. And I started transferring the files. About half way through, the drive began to act up again. I get errors when trying to copy files saying that Finder cannot open the file.

Since the hiccups seem to happen after the drive is on for a while - more than an hour - I think it may be a heat issue. The "quiet fan" sounds like a jet engine, and I'll be the first to admit that my apartment doesn't have AC!

So my question is - can I remove the SATA drives and put them in another enclosure? At my office we have SATA RAID towers and extra drive trays. If I pop open the LaCie and pop the drives into the RAID will they mount? Will it help? Or is it the drives themselves that are causing the problem.

I think I have about a week left in my warranty, but to be honest, I am worried that LaCie will loose the data.

What would you do? And don't say "back-up the media" cause hind sight is always 40/40.

-Rick


P.S. If the drive does crap out completely - any one got a Panasonic AJ 1200A deck I could rent? The cheapest I know is HDstudios for $1200 a week.

here's the ule of thumb,

if the stick isn't bigger than your thumb you can beat your wife

and heres my rule of lacie, or h.d. warranty's

assume it's going to be deleted. or they will give you a new drive

as to what would huappen if you remove the drives, Id say it should work, but i don't know enough about striped drives to tell you if it would work or not.

good luck

oh and ps, i don't mean to be an dick, about the whole beating the wife thing, not to let you down or anythin, but that law was abolished long ago..

and spousal abuse is very very wrong, watch cops they do it for you



Amateur Teacher

I believe you will find that all desktop external drives, either Firewire or SATA have ATA parallel drives inside. That goes 100% for Firewire and most vendors of external SATA use PATA drives inside the case.

<<< 1.6TB Bigger Disk Extreme>>>

How is it raided now?

Koz

It was raided 0 - again hind sight is 40/40 - should have mirrored them!

What's got me worried is some files copy, some don't. And the ones that don't sometimes do!

And if this wasn't bad enough - I happen to live in one of the 800 homes that lost power in Marina Del Rey. So halfway through transferring some files I lost power. Power hasn't come back on yet, so I have no idea what condition the drives are in now!

John, is there anyway to know if they are SATA or parallel without cracking the case? And if they are parallel - I could put them in an old MEDEA enclosure that I have.

Am I right in thinking that it is the enclosure that is overheating, and not just the drives that are failing?

""is there anyway to know if they are SATA or parallel without cracking the case?""

I don't think so. I have several PATA drives converted to SATA inside and external to my Mac G4 and there is no way I can tell that they are PATA except to open the case.

If I had to guess at it, the files you had open when the power failed have no data management table any more and they're gone.

Typically one or two.

<<<And the ones that don't sometimes do!>>>

It depends on what's wrong. We had a cabinet motherboard go south and connenction to the drives would come and go.

If you have oxide dust or other debris floating around inside one of the drives, the platters could be slowly scratching themselves to death like a good grade of Home Depot (on Jefferson) sandpaper.

You are the living example of the warning we give people who buy mind-bendingly enormous drives and then fill them up. If the drive assembly does south, you can take up plumbing because your entire career is gone.

Koz

Have you run Disk Warrior on that drive? I would do that before i did anything. Or at least Disk utility.

FireWire drives....whatever......man do they suck.



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<<<FireWire drives....whatever......man do they suck.>>>

Well. Maybe. In our case, we were using RAID5 (1T LaCie running as 750G) and we thought one of the drives was going into the toilet. The repair humans replaced the drive and let it rebuild itself--but we were still having troubles.

[entering scratching head mode]

The upshot was no matter what we did, there was always something wrong. We replaced the backplane/motherboard (really, the cabinet) and suddenly, everything's OK.

So the stacks have one more layer of complexity than just the number of drives.

We lost a bunch of time but zero data.

Koz

<<<should have mirrored them!>>>

We like RAID5. You get a backed up drive system that only loses 1/4 of the size.

<<<And the ones that don't sometimes do!>>>

That's the worst suckiness. You can't do batch transfer of files--and even if you do, some of the files will not play.

<<<my apartment doesn't have AC!>>>

I don't have AC in Del Rey, either. I had to shut down some of the systems when they started to overheat. Even with ventilation, when the outside temperature goes to 85, the temperature inside the room goes to 90 and temperature inside the cabinet is going to be in a very dangerous range.

Koz

Just wanted to follow up:

I got all the media off the suspect drive. What ended up keeping the drive "stable" was sticking a large window fan in front of the drive. I guess the drive was just overheating.

I'm happy all my files are backed up, but what should I do with the drive? Send it to LaCie - or just try to keep it cool?

Equipment designers use the idea that the design is going to be used in the same room where humans are comfortable. Most humans are not comfortable at 90 degrees.

Depending on how much the managers let the designers go nuts is how hot the design will get before it fails. If there is no leeway in the design, it will start to fail in the 80s, which is just about where yours bit the dust.

If you were editing in Kansas, you would never be able to work in 80 degree heat. The humidity would kill you. It's only here that you can get away with that--but the equipment can't sweat--so it fails.

You should probably send the equipment back for inspection or service on the same day you install an air conditioner.

Koz

In LA, it's crazy talk to set up your system with no AC.
You can get away with it in San Francisco though. Cool and foggy today, as usual on a summer day.

"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" - Mark Twain



Kevin Monahan
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And editing a major project without battery backup UPS is hanging a big sign out for murphy to kick you. A brown or a blackout, or big inductive load spikes form your neighbors AC WILL eat you. It is not an if . . . just a when. You don't necicarily need hours worth - just enough to shut down calmly when the UPS alarm starts screaming at you.

Ian