I recently purchased two of the new 500GB LaCie Quadra external drives for capture/archive through Final Cut 5. I quickly began recieving "dropped frame" error messages when trying to capture to and sometimes even play from the drives. This has happened on two different computers with three different decks and both firewire 400 and 800, even though everything has worked fine with previous generation LaCie drives. It almost seems like the new drives are taking over my computer's firewire bus.

The manufacturer didn't understand what was going on, so I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced any wacky stuff with these new drives.

I dont use Lacie externals drives for that reason, and also because everyone I have ever purchased has gone up in blue smoke.

It is the drives, not your computer.

Wow. Generally I just use them as archive drives, so that's probably why my luck has lasted so long. Which brand/model do you use primarily?

I had, key word had, the Lacie Terabyte drives. I believe they were the bigger disc versions, had 4 drives inside. I used them for storage, and for streaming my footage from, meaning before I put a 750GB drive in my iMac, I used those. Now I just buy 750's and get my drive enclosure off of the web, and use the 750 in my iMac to store current projects. No more speed issues.

My experience with Lacie was this..
Overheating
Finder crashes
Skipping, or loss of frame rate while working with HDV footage
Raid boards going bad
Blue smoke
Bad power supplies
Random drive failures.

In the past 2 years I have lost 7 Terabytes worth of data from Lacie, I will never go back to them.

One LaCie Drive, and it died and never bought another one.

I actually had call one of thise Drive Savors compnaies, and they told me tha around teh lab they actualled them "Lazy" drives because they break so often and LaCie does nothing about it.

So I never bought one again.
M

One LaCie Drive, and it died and never bought another one.

I actually had call one of thise Drive Savors compnaies, and they told me tha around teh lab they actualled them "Lazy" drives because they break so often and LaCie does nothing about it.

So I never bought one again.
M

Any problems with G Tech G raid drives? I'm soon going to purchase one (more than likely this brand) - FW800 1TB (which I may mirror...depending on if I can set that up).

After a couple days of troubleshooting it appears my week old lacie quadra 500 was the culprit behind my dropped frame issues in FCP. Calling B&H Tomorrow. G-tech here I come!

I have spend the last three days downloading corrupted audio files in fragments from a Lacie Quadra to CD for editing in Protools. The client recorded to CF then copied to Lacie 500 gig external drive and wiped the cards. The Lacie likes to pick random sections to lock-up for 2 minutes. I have 4 Glyph drives that work very well. I am also looking into the G Tech raid, but will probably stick with Glyph.

Lazy..HA...I like that.

Yeah, I'm not real happy.

Can anyone recommend a decent firewire enclosure that supports sata drives?

Interesting. I use Lacie D2E drives for my HD capture and have never had a single problem. So far I've discarded Maxtor, because of the constant drive failures, and don't touch standard HDD's (Segate or Western Digital) in external enclosures because of the power/connection problems. Actually, the Maxtor drives usually tend to actually outlast those! So far my Lacie has outlasted any other HDD bar the one thats actually in my Mac.

Never heard of Glyph...not sure if you can get them in the uk?
I've just found a good price on a G Tech G raid Drive (500gb) which will get me out of my desperate lack of space situation very quickly.
There are also G tech G Drives and SATA's...unfortunately I still don't know the difference between them all :(
The G safe's might be a good bet as they are automatically mirrored (and the SATA drives are hot swappable)...so many questions!

B&H is exchanging my Lacie Quadra for the G-Technology 500gb fw400/800 drive. It's just the standard non raid version. My only worry is that it is fanless......but I keep my office pretty cool anyway.

B&H is exchanging my Lacie Quadra for the G-Technology 500gb fw400/800 drive. It's just the standard non raid version. My only worry is that it is fanless......but I keep my office pretty cool anyway.

Let us know how you get on with this one...to be honest I don't really know what the difference is between the standard and the raid drive...striped...mirrored etc.

I am not employed by nor affiliate with... own stock in.. etc. etc.
However, my experience with LaCie has been very positive. I own 6 drives overall.
2- 250 gig
2- 500 gig
and
2- 1.28 Terrabyte drives.

All have performed well given that they are firewire and have limitations. They cannot preform like eSata drives, which we are moving to entirely this year.

We produce in HDV, HDCam and still have a fantastic Digital Beta cam as well. FCP and Macs are the backbone of our editing systems. Currently we are editing 1/2 hour show for PBS shot in Ecuador and are beginning a second that we completed last week in Alaska for Audubon and the Lab of Ornithology.
Tim Barksdale
Birdman Productions LLC
Choteau, MT

I have had nothing but good experiences with Lacie. It's not fair to condemn an entire brand due to one bad drive because most drives have similar failure rates. Btw, I don't believe Lacie makes the hard drive, they build the enclosure and put an interface card with it. The heavy metal enclosure transfers heat from the drive without the need of a noisy fan, and their interface cards provide good transfer rates.

For the past 3 years we've been purchasing all our external FW drives and single-drive enclosures from OWC (http://www.macsales.com) and have had phenominal performance and reliability. Not one bad drive/enclosure and superb customer support, not to mention their prices on bare drives even enterprise-class drives is the best around.

At issue with some of the external enclosures isn't the drives they select to put inside but more the controller/backplane of the enclosure, many of which have been getting their parts from China and of course QC on most China-made items has fallen through the floor.

OWC, DVServe, Sonnet and a few others only purchase components from first-tier suppliers of which none of the China-based outlets are.