Anyone using the LaCie 4 Big Quadra?

I have known five Lacies, four are dead.

We also ran a couple of polls on this in the forum. The first poll was before the forum had the software to add up and display results, but the outcome was about 50/50 people who had them fail and hated them and people who hadn't had them fail and liked them. In the second poll I think it was about 60/40 in favour of not-yet-failed-and-are-OK.

I originally ran the poll because lots of people ask me for recommendations for external HDs, and I wanted to know if I was being biased in my opinion based on my experience. Personally, I still wouldn't recommend them, given about half of the people who replied had had catastrophic losses.

So I wouldn't buy one for myself, but I wouldn't stop someone who really wanted one, either. Just be careful with it (or any external), and keep backups of mission critical stuff.

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With RAID, even if half the LaCie's failed and no CalDigital's failed (each within the intended lifetime) you'd be money ahead with LaCie's.

That is a totally unprofessional opinion & advice. If HALF your LaCie's FAILED and no Caldigits FAILED, how much $$$ in WORK would you lose by buying LaCies?

Get you priorities straight before you start calling people names "cuz".

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It's hard to justify spending more than twice as much if you don't have any concrete examples to point to.

You get what you pay for and I am speaking from personal operating experience. My facilities over the last 8 years of my career have lost way too many LaCie D2s and I am tired of defending that fact and being called a "SNOB MOB". If you have a failed drive, will LaCie OVERNIGHT you one within warranty? NO. You will have to send the old one back. Caldigit will work with you to GET YOUR WORK DONE. This is not a matter of "buy this or buy that". If you take the work seriously, you have to PROTECT IT. LaCie is like a "@#$%& Shoe Factory"...pumping out product for store shelves. I have spent hours on the phone with their Tech Support & Sales staff just trying to establish which drives are inside the enclosures. THEY COULD NOT TELL ME. They said it changes from month to month - could be one of 4 manufacturers. There are folks here (like Loren) that have not had any issues - and more power to him - but I apologize, but I will not play Russian Roulette with my work. I want to know what's under the hood. I want the HEMI and not the 318 small block. I will pay extra for the 1000 times better Customer Care / Support with Caldigit and I know what drives are in Caldigit units.

So go ahead...save a few bucks and buy that LaCie off the shelf. How much $$$ are the hours of shooting / editing / rendering / grafix work worth to you? What happened to "the work is the thing"?

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

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less than professional

Precisely why I don't use LaCie anymore...

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They offer no objective evidence that LaCie's are junk

...how about the fact that they updated the BigDisk to have the whole case as a heat sink?

Surely this backs up everything I have ever said about LaCie cases - you could almost cook on them!

Seriously - why don't you do a google search for problems with LaCie - last time I looked there was well over a million links and a quick scan through showed many of the issues are the ones we all "snobbishly" deal with here.

If you need anymore "objective" evidence then you're having a laugh.

I hope that the re-design is coupled with a change of HDD manufacturer too - then maybe we will see a marked improvement in their reliability. But I'm not going to recommend them until I see them working solidly for at least a year.

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With RAID, even if half the LaCie's failed and no CalDigital's failed (each within the intended lifetime) you'd be money ahead with LaCie's.

Sorry but I don't see how this is good work sense? If half of your RAID failed even with RAID 6 you would be screwed - and that is not acceptable.

Why are you trying to convince anyone who is serious about reliability and performance to buy something that has a particularly high rate of failure just because its cheaper?

"Here, buy this car without seat-belts or airbag... Oh don't worry if you crash you can afford another one..."

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you've run into the anti-LaCie snob mob

Nice to make it personal...

These "snobs" are all long-time professionals with a hell of a lot of experience and they actually take their jobs and data security seriously - all who have had issues or had to deal with issues with LaCie products.

I myself try not to make suggestions that will waste time/money for others.

In my extensive experience both direct and indirect of resolving issues with LaCie HDDs I can not recommend them.

It is not "snobbish" to want a better quality - as it is not a false belief that other manufacturers make better more reliable products.

Hell, I have unbranded cases that are better than the LaCie ones.



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> With RAID, even if half the LaCie's failed and no CalDigital's failed (each within the intended
> lifetime) you'd be money ahead with LaCie's.
> Sorry but I don't see how this is good work sense? If half of your RAID failed even with RAID 6
> you would be screwed - and that is not acceptable.

Ben is right.
On paper the "cheaper even if replaced" logic makes sense...but in a real work environment, any money you save by buying cheap will be offset -- and indeed surpassed by the following factors:

1. Your data may actually be lost;
2. You'll make your client(s) wait, miss deadlines, have your reputation damaged by any such delays;
3. Replacement costs;
4. Time, hassle and delays if the replacement warranty isn't solid;
5. Time wasted on (lack of) tech support;
6. Any labour costs associated with the delays by having to hire your editors, FX artists, producers etc. for longer than the job should have taken.

As with almost everything else in post-production, quality equipment translates into low costs. And not just a one-time saving, either...but lower costs throughout the pipeline, and increased savings as time goes on. Hire a cheap editor, you end up with crap editing and would have to eat it from unhappy clients...and still have to hire a real editor to come in and fix the mess anyway. Buy a cheap drive that fails on you, and you'll probably eventually have to buy a more expensive one for peace of mind, so you saved no money at all. Buying and hiring high quality saves you money in the long run, just as proper, safe, tested (usually slower) workflow saves you time in the long run.

> Hell, I have unbranded cases that are better than the LaCie ones.

Same here. In my own experience, even Maxtors last longer than Lacies, bizarrely enough.

As stated many times before, we have nothing against users who haven't had bad experiences with this brand. We have no objections to your stating your good experiences and recommending this brand based on your own experiences. Just don't dismiss and slam those of us -- and I assure you there are many -- who have had ugly experiences with this brand. We respect your opinions; you better damn well respect ours.


www.derekmok.com

objective evidence?

ok, i once bought two lacie porsche drives at a local computer store for an emergency data transfer need. the vast majority of the content copied to both drives was left corrupted. the error message i got when opening the files even hinted at drive failure mentioning a "termination error"

"Objective evidence that LaCie's are junk" does not mean six guys' honest testimonials about their LaCie problems, any more than my good luck with my six LaCie's is evidence that LaCies are not junk. All informal surveys are prone to bias. Until some neutral agency does a thorough, controlled laboratory study with a large number of specimens, we don't know the answer to aquaimage's question. The "mob" doesn't really know that LaCie's are junk and I don't really know that they're OK.
What we know is that LaCie's are cheap and CalDigital's are expensive. Naturally the LaCie company treats its customers cheaply. LaCie's are drives you buy cheaply online and might have to throw away when they die. With that user mindset, they might be a good choice. For example, does anyone disagree that it is smarter to buy two LaCie's, using one to diligently back up the other, than to buy one CalDigital and dare not to back up?
Whatever hard drive solution we choose, we'll take near-zero chance with losing data. We'll use some RAID or other back up regimen. We also don't want great hassle, but we may choose to accept minor hassle in order to save money.
I believe that the reliability of the RAID controller is more important than the reliability of the drives themselves.
I personally prefer to back up work manually using a second fully independent external hard drive. I back up scratch files before commencing editing. I let FCP's autosave back up editing projects to the internal hard drive every 5 minutes, and then manually back up the projects daily. I don't back up render files. Re-rendering in the event of a hard drive failure is a minor hassle (which others might find major). Overnight transferring 500 GB of data, the average size of my projects, to a new drive in the event of a hard drive failure, is another minor hassle (which others might find major).
Whether it is fiscally preferable to use LaCie's or CalDigital's depends on hard drive life statistics we don't have. It is a gamble, but it does not have to include any gambling with the editing work itself.

"For example, does anyone disagree that it is smarter to buy two LaCie's, using one to diligently back up the other, than to buy one CalDigital and dare not to back up?"

WHOLE HEARTEDLY. Same amount of money being spent, only with the LaCie method, you are adding more work. Now you have to manually back up the footage, and if you add new footage, back up that new footage....and pay attention to what footage you have, and where it goes. So now you are spending the same amount of money, only creating more work for you. Why would you do that? I would rather buy the good drive cases and have peice of mind.

"LaCie's are drives you buy cheaply online and might have to throw away when they die. With that user mindset, they might be a good choice."

That is a HORRIBLE mindset. "Let's buy cheap and then just toss it into the garbage when it breaks and get a new one." Just what we need, MORE GARBAGE. I'd rather get a good drive that lasts a long time, than 3 drives with two ending up in the landfill. That is a pretty poor midset to be in.

I'd rather spend $100 to get a good pair of shoes, than $30 to get cheap shoes that wear out in 3 months. I bought custom Converse All-Stars 3 years ago...still going strong.

As for your large number of specimens, we did have that POLL that Jude mentioned...and it was 50/50. SO 50% failure rate with a decent control study. Want another poll?


www.shanerosseditor.com

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> LaCie's are drives you buy cheaply online and might have to throw away when they die. With
> that user mindset, they might be a good choice.

It is because you're using equipment that is under constant threat of failure that you would think like this. I expect my equipment to work, and to last, with proper maintenance. I still have a 42GB Promax drive from 2000 -- yes, almost nine years old now -- that mounts without fail every single time. And it's been used for about 30 editing projects in its first year alone. Quality.

Backups are good. But if you're going to do that, then get two reliable drives.

> "Objective evidence that LaCie's are junk" does not mean six guys' honest testimonials about
> their LaCie problems, any more than my good luck with my six LaCie's is evidence that LaCies
> are not junk.

Then what gives you the right to take a superior position and call us a "mob"?

Besides, personal experience may be subjective, but a collection of hundreds of personal experiences goes beyond subjective into the realm of statistics. And completely "objective" lab tests and studies are also subjective in that lab tests don't reflect reality 100 per cent. Crash test dummies survive crash tests intact; doesn't mean people driving those cars couldn't get decapitated when they crash.

Your opinion is in the minority here, dcouzin. Minority opinions are good, they add to the discussion. But stop using insulting terms on us.


www.derekmok.com

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I believe that the reliability of the RAID controller is more important than the reliability of the drives themselves.

Once again...unprofessional opinion / advice. The reliability of ANYTHING writing your work data is of the utmost importance. One is no more important than the other. If your RAID card is rock solid and you have to replace drives every year, you work in fear of a failure. It is on us "6 guys" because we are the ones that responded. That's pretty big odds being that very few LaCie users responded kindly. The OP asked for our opinions.

You discredit your own opinions here by insulting those of us that have had bad experiences with LaCie just because you haven't. Read ALL the posts before responding in such an irresponsible and unprofessional tone.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

To Shane Ross's "WHOLE HEARTEDLY" comment. Maybe we're just disagreeing semantically. By "dare to not back up" I meant no back up at all, no RAID, nothing. It is really wreckless to use even a first class hard drive with no back up. It is smarter to use two LaCie's. Do the arithmetic. Even if the LaCie's have a horrible 50% annual failure rate, the risk of two LaCie's failing on the same day of a year, which is risk of losing your work that year, is just 0.13%. This is at least an order of magnitude better than the reliability of high quality hard drives (http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf).

To derekmok. I also like my equipment to work and to last, and maintain it suchly. I show home movies with a Keystone 8mm projector that was my father's and will someday be my son's. But hard disk drives are different. They are overdriven and designed and manufactured with unavoidably significant failure rates. The mechanics are not user mainainable; they require clean-room assembly. All users of hard drives, whether the cheapest or most expensive, must deal with a significant risk of catastrophic failure.

I know that LaCie drives have a horrible reputation in the video community. I don't know if the basis is objective. For example, if one drive make had twice the annual failure rate as another drive make, that experience could rebound within a professional community and become exaggerated. The danger is that the somewhat better drive make comes to be seen as so good that its significant annual failure rate is ignored, and the somewhat inferior drive make comes to be seen as unusable junk. All hard disk drives can fail, with significant probability, and we must work around this. Is the workaround any different with the world's cheapest hard drives and the world's costliest? I don't think so, so I buy LaCie's.

Get what you want dcouzin. We'll get what we want. And we will continue to warn people against buying drives from a company with a bad track record.

"Don't buy the Ford Pinto! If you get rear ended, your car will explode!"

"Awww, they're so cheap, if that happens I'll just drive the other one."

If you get a good drive you don't have to worry about backing up. I didn't, and still don't. Now I use RAid 5 boxes on most my higher end stuff, and that is a protected raid. But I too have a 9 year old drive that I made sure came from a reputable company...and it is working strong. If it weren't 60GB I'd use it more often...one of my favs.


www.shanerosseditor.com

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> I don't know if the basis is objective. For example, if one drive make had twice the annual
> failure rate as another drive make, that experience could rebound within a professional
> community and become exaggerated.

I don't know what "professional community" you work in, but this is again flat-out not true. Around here, we tell it like it is. If the new heat-dissipating Lacie chasses work well after two or three years of reasonable use, I'd revise my evaluation. And we have also done so for G-Tech drives -- they used to be recommended, but the last few batches have had issues I'm experiencing firsthand, and I will not recommend them as forerunners anymore, just as Shane and Joe have also stopped recommending them.

Pros don't stay blindly loyal to products. The products have to earn our trust, and they have to stay at a certain quality to keep that trust. That's why our reputations and theirs are worth something. I sing the praises of Promax drives, but I'll also mention the fact that one time, they sent me 400GB drives instead of the 500GB drives I'd ordered and paid for, and the customer representative that day tried to convince me it was my mistake ("500GB drives don't actually have 500GB of space...". A singular blemish on their record doesn't ruin everything, but a blemish is a blemish, and Lacie's earned plenty of blemishes. When you see 150 users in a three-year period have the exact same issues with a product, it's no "exaggeration".


www.derekmok.com

Yeah, G-Raids used to be the gold standard. And the Original ones still are, IMHO. The NEW ones (G-RAID 2) are the ones with issues. I still use the two original G-Raids I have.

And they are an expensive drive too.

Recommend cheap ones? OWC has a great line of firewire drives that work well.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
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Support?
Where's a LaCie support person giving support in this forum within 3 hours of the post?

------------------------
Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.

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dcouzin
Also my 3 little (Porsche design) USB-2 LaCies have worked perfectly.

I'll add that I've never had any issues with Lacie's 2.5" drive based products ... we have many many of these, specifically their "Little Big Disk" range and their "Rugged" range. To date they performed excellently. My guess is that its the drive class, controller or perhaps just the basic technology used in Lacie's laptop drive based products that makes them so much more reliable than their bigger 3.5" drive based cousins ... but thats just a best guess based on my experience with them so far.

So to sum up my own particular 2c on the topic, if you are buying larger format desktop storage then steer well clear of the Lacie brand, but if you are looking for reliable mobile storage solutions then Lacie offer some excellent products that are well worth investigating.

I will concede that I have never heard of any 2.5" External HDD going down (internal yes - PS3s, Laptops, a few iPods, etc but not specific external) - including LaCie's offerings - but then people don't use them (or shouldn't do!) in the same way as the larger faster drives.

Any external HDD with low grade mech, cheap connectors and a case that retains the heat is bad.

Keeping your computer equipment cool is important for all components not just HDDs.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

lacie is junk.

Its like the Yugo or Kia of HDDs. Even Crossfire is more reliable. I have never heard any good stories about the drive.

Seagate, CalDigit, G-Raid, Hitachi and even though i WILL NOT use them Western Digital, are the drive that exist in real life. Everything else is a Magnet of your Fignation.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Thanks for the info. I was really surprised at the strong responses to what I thought would be a relatively unemotional subject.

aquaimage, there's nothing whatsoever unemotional about losing ones data

and hey, isn't this what collective wisdom is all about

Unemotional...????

One of my former Directors was VERY emotional when I had to convey to him just how screwed the $200,000 of client work on his LaCies was! Tick tick tick went the drives...

Lucky I had a backup of the FCP project file! Unfortunately all the rendered AE files and GFX had to be recreated from scratch. With 78 hours to get it ready for duplication I got it done.

Lost sleep, free work (to hide the fact from the client) and major stress.

Emotional is just the tip of the LaCie "iceberg" that heads for your "Titanic"d2 drives...

Avoid early and don't listen to those that say they "will do" or even worse "iceberg proof"!!!



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Easy Ben...you are sounding like an angry "Mob" all to yourself

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

ALARM: [AwooooOOOOOOooooga]



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Hmm.. I tend to agree that certain the D2 models of Lacies are very unreliable. I've had 4 out of 5 units conk out on me within a span of a year. All the issues seems to be a controller board issue. The drives they use are usually ok. Luckily for me, they were used in pairs in a daily sync system so data losses were minimal. What my supplier and I found out was that my usage of the drives in high intensity usage caused the controller/RAID boards to die faster than usual. These drives were running 24/7 and were storage drives for video assets or photo assets where drive heads were zipping back and forth almost 12-14 hrs a day. The D2 casing did not provide adequate ventilation and cooling for the boards. My entire workstation/area/data-centre is air conditioned 24/7 at 16 degrees celsius with a purposed designed airflow circulating the entire drive storage area. The tell-tale signs of failure were difficulting in mounting and random dismounting of the drives and/or long wait for drive mounting.

However, I also use almost all the other models from Lacie ranging from two S2S units, one older twobig unit, their portable 160gb firewire, Rugged etc et al. The TwoBig (sata) unit also died from similar causes just shy of a year. The S2s however is running brilliantly along with the others smaller portables and is currently my Lacie-of-choice in recommendations as I have them connected via esata running 4 disk RAID 0 + 1 archive and 2 RAID 1 + hotswap. These have so far been great and I have since then moved all services to these drives. The D2s have been relegated to simple archival duties with intermittent usage and remain unpowered most of the time.

Before anyone tries to flame on statistics and probabilities, just think about this. I have roughly 5TB of D2s acquired within the span of two years and the probability of failure should not even come close of 20% failure. Having 4 die isnt even funny. We (the vendor and I) have logically deducted these issues out carefully isolating the D2 drive casing as the culprit because my storage system is largely based on Lacie's product line and I have over 15TB of storage consisting of the S2s and others. Let's face it.. (Lacie).. the D2 casings were not meant for heavy duty usage. On a side note, I also use the 321 LCD from Lacie (NEC) and even that has been brilliant. All in all, most of their products are good.. just the D2 line isnt quite there.

Thanks to davidcheok for bringing the discussion back to sanity.

A brand can make one line of lemons and a tight user community erect an exaggerated theory that the brand is junk. (Granted this wasn't helped by LaCie being a cheap outfit with unideal product support and whacky marketing -- witness the profusion of models and their confusing names.)

Still, is davidcheok sure that even the whole d2 line is troubled by overheating? d2 denotes a cast aluminum case design. Within the d2 line is the 4 big Quadra with its "auminum heat sink design for safe, fanless, quieter operation" and also the Big Disk Extreme with its "thermo-regulated progressive quiet fan". It is implausible that the d2 with the fan should have the very same overheating problem as the d2 without the fan. Thus my initial answer to aquaimage stated: "I intuited (based on specs) that the LaCie Big Disk Extreme series was better-built than the LaCie Quadra series, and I didn't need SATA, so I bought three of the former." None of my Big Disk Extreme's, average age 1.5 years, has failed.

Conceivably some early d2's with fans had thermostat problems. That's trivial to re-engineer. So if overheating really was the problem with some d2's, current Big Disk Extreme d2's shouldn't have the problem.

all i know is that, if lacie had a good modrl then there would be some creditable school of folks out there to say positive things about the brand. But all i ever see is post here, CC, and other pages that have ONE guy saying," hey lacie is great" then everyone else saying," No, its crap.!."

not like G-Raid where you can get a post with 3 every so slightly bad reviews and 15 good reviews. Or Caldigit where no one hardly believes that you ever have problems with the brand.

I remember last year when i was looking for drives someone saying in a CC post that "seagate is not the brand it use ta be". So i bought a hitachi's (good solid drives). However after reading more about seagate and learning it was the fastest at data trans rate in the 7200.11, i purchased seagate this year because for every negutive post i found, i found 20 positive.

You dont get that with lacie and honestly you really don't get that with western digital either.


DONT BUY A YUGO............ i mean .......... LACIE

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"