Lacie Big Disk Triple Interface Drive = Piece of Junk, Waste of Money

Let me first state that this may not be representative of anyone else's experience with Lacie drives. However, this is my experience with this worthless (to me) piece of computer equipment.

For the record, I purchased this Lacie 320GB Big Disk Extreme/Triple Interface drive from PCMall.com a long time ago (two years?). Since that time, it has proven to be the biggest waste of money - technologically speaking - that I have spent. I simply wanted a reliable hard drive to use for backups. Then I got involved in the NSLU2-Linux community and I decided to use the drive with a NSLU2. Shortly thereafter, the problems started. The NSLU2 would hang from time to time - usually with no rhyme or reason and certainly no pattern. I would do disk checks and the drive would come up with plenty of errors. I finally got smart and connected a BYOD (Bring Your Own Disk) external enclosure with my NSLU2 and haven't had any real issues with the NSLU2 since.

So I then tried to use the drive as that backup target. Nothing but bad times: random disconnection of the drive [which looked to be related to the time the drive was running versus ambient temp]. When I first contacted Lacie, they had me test the drive and it looked like it was happy connected to my wife's iMac (where the drive is most useless to me) via Firewire. So I sent the drive off and Lacie supposedly fixed the problem.

Fast forward six months to the Summer of 2006. I found a semi-permanent location for the drive on my desk at home where it would be sporadically connected to my hard drive. Boy, does that describe the situation to a "T".... "Sporadic!" I never really used the drive that much, but exactly when I needed to - I could just about guarantee a disconnect. The laptop would give that USB-disconnect sound (of Windows XP), followed by either an error message on screen or the error message and a USB-connect sound. I became so disgusted with the situation that I simply powered the drive off and resolved to not use it.

Fast forward to today. I decided to see what - if anything - Lacie might do about this. I called their tech support a very short while ago. The short story? "Your unit is out of warranty and wow, it does sound like the USB interface might be the problem. Don't you think you could use it via Firewire?" The long story? Lacie should have painted this drive yellow. It's a lemon, an example of bad engineering or manufacturing (why else would you recommend someone to keep using it via the Firewire interface?) a qualified piece of junk. What ticks me off: the one year warranty was just long enough for them to get off the hook for repairing it ever again. I will never buy or recommend a Lacie product in the future. (Yeah, that'll get Lacie shaking in their collective corporate boots....)

What have I done with the drive? I considered slapping it on eBay with a "Buy it now!" price of a $0.01 with free shipping, but I really don't want the negative feedback that would probably result. I'm disassembling this piece of junk and salvaging the hard drives for other uses - probably in external enclosures where they'll work just fine. Hmmm... nice WD Caviar 160os...

PS. Bleh. Just checked the warranty on these drives and they don't have the nice warranty that Western Digital drives usually have for the simple reason that Lacie purchased them. Great! Another reason to dislike Lacie...

Thanks for nothing, Lacie. Keep up the crappy workmanship, and the even nicer "I'm sorry that your unit isn't working, is out of warranty, and can't you find a friend who might want it as a working Firewire unit?" response from technical support.

PPS. In a completely opposite example of technical support: I contacted Logitech about my MX1000 Laser mouse that just recently stopped working. I've had this thing for well over a year (out of warranty most likely). It's randomly registering a single click as a double click - which will drive you nuts (ok, it's driving *me* nuts!) After some troubleshooting, the support person asked me for three things - email address, phone number and physical address. They're sending me - no questions asked, free of charge a MX Revolution. SWEET! Thank you, Logitech! You guys ROCK!