1 Terabyte LaCie drive

[Mac G5 2.5 dual processor, FCP 4]

I just bought the LaCie drive, and have been running it a lot, to see if it wants to fail in the first few days.

After 5 minutes of running, it settles into a cyclical or pulsing sound, as opposed to a steady hum. And it makes a lot of noise with a fan (I'm guessing) every once in awhile. Just wondered if other people have heard that, if it's normal or if I should rush back to the store and demand a refund.

It seems to work fine for data and all that.

Thanks,
Dave Miller
davereal@aol.com

With 4 disk drives inside that case, it might just be the rpm of each drive "beating"acoustically against the next one, especially if the drives are touching each other.

I would go into the Apple System Profiler and try to find out what manufacturer of disk drives is inside the case. If it is Maxtor - RUN AWAY!

I personally haven't had problems with Maxtor drives -- don't like 'em, but a TV show I worked on (with revolving drives going to multiple editors) had Maxtors, Lacies and Red Orbs running all over the place. The Lacies gave us the most trouble (no power switch...whose bright idea was that?). Granted, though, Maxtors always feel cheap.

Dave,

I've two of those 1TB units. Yes, they work just fine (wearing a flak jacket as I write this here), but are noisy. As you guessed, it's just the fans and drives you hear thrumming along. But, you can put up to a 15 foot firewire cable on them. More with a booster. Mine are parked on the floor of a 19" rack well away from the edit desk and together with all the other noisy stuff.

Just don't put 'em in the refrigerator.

hth,
Clay

Dave,

No disrespect to your purchase, and I hate to tell people that have already made purchases that I think they made a mistake... but I am a big believer in doing MASSIVE research before putting any system components together. I contacted LaCie personally and grilled them about their FW800 drives and told them I was going to need it for HIGH VOLUME - 24/7 Audio / Video editing.

That said...the 1 Terabyte Lacie "Bigger Disk" is not a good idea for video (good for storage, but not for full-on editing). First of all, the drives are "Spanned", not RAIDed like the Big Disk Extreme... that means it writes to one internal drive until it's full, than the next & so on. AS you probably know, RAID's write to all disks simultaneously.

They also have a problem with HEAT & NOISE. HEAT = DEATH for components (as you probably know).

Using the 1 TB is like playing russian roulette with your media. You never know when it's gonna go down.

(plink - plink) ...my 2¢

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Look at the G-Raid the next time instead - very happy with that - relatively quiet (does have a fan - but not obnoxious) Very speedy - Andy Field

<<<Using the 1 TB is like playing russian roulette with your media.>>>

Don't stop at 1T. If the drive system goes down, you could lose years of work all in one puff of smoke. Either 500M on two separate drives and cabinets, or 2, 1T drives in separate cabinets.

Each is an exact copy of the other. Leave them copying each other at the end of the day.

Alternately, buy a drive system with the RAID flavor that allows you to change a dead drive without losing work. By the way, if you go cheap here, the drives will die in groups of two and you lose anyway. Ask me how I know this.

You will probably not be able to edit from these drives. Anything that large is just going to take too long to find stuff. Reserve these monsters for archival storage and get a good, fast 80Gg to 150G internal for actual editing.

The system is not open ended. A 500T drive may take several minutes to find a movie and depending on file management may or may not be able to play it in real time it after it's found.

Koz

Yes sir... I would rather have 3 - G-RAID FW800 320 Gig'ers than a 1 - TB doorstop.

G-RAID: Lose 1 - still have 2.
1 TB: Lose 1 - lose it all.

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

The G-RAID system is SATA, right? Has anyone had luck with LaCie's new RAID 5 array?

I use 3 LaCie's in its 160GB D2 FW 800/400/USB2 design and not a problem. I also have them plugged into my UPS and I Diskwarrior them regularly.

- Loren
Today's FCP 5 keytip:
Do a virtual Audio Mixdown to lighten playback load with Command-Option-R!

The FCP HD KeyGuide?: your power placemat.
Now available at KeyGuide Central
www.neotrondesign.com

Read somewhere that 1 TB single drive HD's are coming fairly soon, to be followed by even bigger stuff. Must be writing 1's and 0's at the atomic level!

Can you imagine losing a TB of DV, omigod.

- Loren
Today's FCP 5 keytip:
Do a virtual Audio Mixdown to lighten playback load with Command-Option-R!

The FCP HD KeyGuide?: your power placemat.
Now available at KeyGuide Central
www.neotrondesign.com

Loren,

G-RAID
[www.g-technology.com]

G-SATA
[www.g-technology.com]

...it's frightening that anyone would trust a single 1 TB drive with so much data.

Not me.

- Joey



Post Edited (06-01-05 21:49)

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I have lots of LaCie 200 & 250 GB drives and have had good experiances with them. I am chicken to get biger drives just in terms of flexibility. I had been considering getting some G-Tech drives but after trouble shooting a friends G-Play Media player drive (completely over-hyped capabilities) and looking at the amount of complaints on their Creative Cow forums I would think long and hard about G-Techs support abilities.

After having this amount of drive space I think Apples X-Raid might be the best all around deal for the larger storage solution.

"it's frightening that anyone would trust a single 1 TB drive with so much data."

LOL

I love you guys. This entire thread is a mirror of a long and loud discussion I recall from 1973 or 74. The house engineer was HORRIFIED that the newly introduced 8 inch floppy drive could loose a whole 240 KB of data.

Since we used a pair of punch tapes to load the CMX every morning, and this would be many many times what we were using, he considered the possibility of loosing that much data at once a total nightmare.

ALL online storage is high risk. Worrying about the amount of data is like asking how partially pregnant your daughter is. You are either protected or not.

And this reminds me -
I'm no angel here - I'm overdue for backups on my office machine. Off to make the backups . . . .

Ian

"...Worrying about the amount of data is like asking how partially pregnant your daughter is. You are either protected or not."

...my DAUGHTER? Wow... that's pretty personal, don't you think Ian?

By using smaller faster units, if one goes down, you don't lose it all. THAT'S the protection. The only way to "protect" yourself with one of these 1 TB Lacie "Spanned" boat anchors is to mirror it on another 1 TB Lacie "Spanned" drive or run retrospect to tape. Most people do not have nor do they even think of that kind of protection - they just digitize & work (do a poll).

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Sh*t goes wrong. That's the way of life in editing. I don't have nearly the experience that Ian does (hmm...1974...not even born yet), but I've seen enough crap and heartbreak stories in that public lab I worked in to know that we can't be paralyzed with fear for potential problems. Also, as illogical and untechnical as it sounds, the more afraid you are of your system, the more stuff goes wrong. It's like the computer can sense when you're not confident, and the very thing you fear would happen, tends to happen. We just have to equip ourselves with the knowledge to deal with it, and have contingency plans. In my experience, when we have a contingency plan, that's when we tend not to have to use it.

I don't like the Lacie 1TB drive either -- too big, too heavy, too slow, too unstable. The TV people I worked with aren't exactly precise in their methodology, and their file management tends to turn every single drive into a war zone. But they bought it, they're gonna use it, and they're gonna ask me to use it. So I just back up my project files like crazy, on three separate places every given time (two folders on the actual drive, and then one I keep on a USB memory stick that I don't ever let other people touch). I DiskWarrior the drive every time it arrives in my hands, and I send it back to the boss if I sense something wrong with it before I start work. That way, if the drive dies on my watch, they can't say I didn't warn them, and we work together to fix the problem. That USB memory stick saved an entire episode of a TV show, about four weeks of on/off editing time, when the TV guys reported a 250GB Lacie drive as dead, and none of them had a backup, but I did. The chances of the drive and my memory stick dying at the same time are close to nil, and if that were to happen...well, what can you do, if even paranoia isn't enough?

I have a 500GB G-Raid drive and it's great.

"...the more afraid you are of your system, the more stuff goes wrong. It's like the computer can sense when you're not confident, and the very thing you fear would happen, tends to happen."

Oh, boy



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I have Mezzo back-up for FCP and I think the large LaCie drives would be a great solution for archiving my smaller drives using the Mezzo program. I need my smaller drives for the sneaker net way I give footage to clients. Basically I am a small production company sub-contractor for larger prod. co.'s, Easy to keep a whole client on one drive if I start using larger drives I have to mix clients. I wouldn't mind having 4 back-ups on on big drive however.

BTW if anyone has a lot of experiance with Mezzo I sure feel their documentaion leaves a hole where it comes to work flow. I wish they had some tutorials.

Brian