However, I was surprised. I did receive a reply from a Mathieu Gasquy who represented himself as the "VP Sales". I would publish the reply here, but Lacie places a "don't publish, talk about or reproduce clause" on emails - or at least the reply I received had that disclaimer. Boiled down to the bare minimum, I was told something along the lines of "customer satisfaction is #1 priority" and I'll be in the office if you care to respond. I responded:
I do appreciate your reply. But frankly, my expectations were so
high, and actual experience with Lacie was so low that I'm not sure
that there is much you can do.
Way back when... when I first looked for an external HDD, I contacted
another computer engineer friend of mine and he gushed over the
experience he had with his Lacie drives. Which led to my purchase of
the lemon. I can understand that your technical support did not find
anything wrong with the drive when it came back for repair. As a
computer engineer, I never could forcefully cause a connect failure -
it seemed as random as eye blinking. The only exception would be when
the drive had been in use for a while and was warm. At those times,
disconnects were often and consistent. That's when it was sent int
for repair. The drive came back, I used it for a short while and
thought the problems might have been fixed. But since I had moved the
drive to a location where it wasn't used all the time, and frankly was
only used at most once a week, I didn't notice a problem until I tried
to restore a drive image from the drive (as my laptop drive was being
imaged once a week automatically). At that time, I noticed that half
the images were corrupt, and when accessing the drive over and over, I
got the same "random" disconnects that were so frustrating in the
first place.
As I posted in my blog, I was so frustrated that I simply powered the
drive down, wrapped up the cables, took it to my office, and put it in
a box. I am 99% sure that the unit would work as wonderfully as it
did with my wife's iMac via FireWire. It was rock solid (even when
the enclosure temp became very warm) connected to it. No disk errors,
no disconnects. But I have no use for it there. The iMac has plenty
of storage that my wife will probably *never* use.
As it is, I've taken the WD drives out, and ordered external
enclosures from newegg.com. Since the unit worked fine with the iMac,
I'm reasonably sure that the hard drives are ok. I dislike that the
drives don't have the warranty from WD that they would normally have,
but I'll get over it.
For the record, the biggest problem that I have with the customer
disservice I received from technical support is that suggestion:
"Since the firewire interface seems to be ok, to figure out how to use
the unit via firewire." Bad analogy: "Sir, your steering column in
your car is broken and won't let you turn left. I suggest you plan
your trips such that you only have right turns to go from place to
place. Since your car is out of warranty, that would be the best
thing for you to do." Frankly, it's an insulting suggestion to me as
a computer engineer.
Sincerely,
Byron Todd
So what has happened since that my reply [which was asked for?]. A big fat NOTHING. Not a blessed thing.
Oh yeah, I should mention that I had another Lacie drive failure recently - the 80GB Porsche designed drive that my church was using completely stopped working. When I tried to recover the data using my home linux server box, there were so many errors and nothing was recovered in place that I'm calling it a dead (as in dead!) drive.
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