Which External Drives?
 

Hello,

I'm not sure where to post this. I won't take offense if it's moved to a different place.

I've been editing on a PC built in 2007 and running Vegas. I've stored a lot of footage, edited or not on lacie drives. Two of them, still under warranty failed. Two out of four. Lacie will replace them, but the data is GONE! This is a failure rate of 50 % since I have 4 drive, all connected to firewire 400. The drives are under warranty for 3 years and took two years to fail. I'm really hesitant to actually send the drives to LACIE so I can have two new ones shipped. Why should I trust them?
Retrieving the data will cost 2000 bucks per drive. I'm a hobbyist, I simply can't afford that!
Or course I'll build my new system running Vegas 10 with a lot of huge internal hard drives from Samsung or WD.
So, I'm curious, does anybody know a cheap way to retrieve the data?
And.. does anybody has had issues with LACIE drives? As far as I'm concerned they are crap enclosed in very slick cases. The failure happened on a 2TB drive and a 1TB drive. I NEVER had a disk failure before using lacie.

All drives fail eventually. Nature of the game. Sounds to me like you need to be investing in a quality backup/archive solution rather than more drives. A drive failure should be an inconvenience, not a catastrophic event.

I have a 7 year old laptop and the drive never failed? It's not supposed to be a professional piece of equipment and it's still running fine. LACIE was sold as a professional equipment meant to be part of a back up system. They failed after two years still under warranty? That is NOT normal! The drives I put in my system when I built it in 2007, and i do have a RAID 0 system for fast video capture, are still working beautifully and every day and they're not under warranty anymore.

I reiterate my questions: Are lacie drives pieces of crap in slick cases compare to the competition?

What is your sample size to derive what is "normal"? I have over 225 servers in my network with well over 1000 drives. I've seen drives fail after a week, and I've got some that have been spinning 24/7 for over 4 years. I expect a failure a week.

Drives have an MTBF rating (Mean Time Between Failures). That means that by law of averages, some will fail sooner and others will fail later. Again, nature of the game.

There is a reason professional video editors work in RAID configurations (and I don't mean RAID 0). Because I don't care WHO's name is on the drives they all fail

Are Lacies crap and others great? No. As far as I am aware, Lacie is not a hard drive manufacturer. So they are buying their drives from a manufacturer, installing them in a case and selling them. Maybe they got a bad batch from someone. Maybe in order to sell to people who refuse to spend the money required for reliability, they cut corners. There's a reason you probably have a Lacie setup and not a G-Tech or CalDigit, or similar. I've seen G-Tech drives in the edit rooms of $10M edit suites. And yet, I've read numerous examples of them failing in batches. I've got two 4TB G-Tech RAIDS and I treat them as though they might fail any day.

You can go spend $50k on a SAN just like we did, and you'll watch those drives fail over time also.

Put an effective backup solution in place, and buy the best drives you can afford.

LaCie doesn't actually make hard drives. They make pretty enclosures and put drives inside of them. I always build my own hard drives so I know that what I'm getting is quality. If you feel adventurous, you can open the case and pull out the drive. Plug in into your motherboard and see if you can read it. Sometimes the chipset that bridges IDE > Firewire goes bad, not the hard drive itself. I've never had a problem with WD bare drives, but have seen 3 Hitachi drives and one Seagate fail, for what it's worth.

Perrone and Edward,

thanks for your answers. I believe you're both right, I should have decent back up.
I'm going to open that drive and see if I can connect it to my Mobo
Still, LACIE, never again!
L.

Proper cooling is the key to longevity of hard drives. Even a crappy hard drive, in an enclosure that cools well, will generally outlast the very best hard drives, if they are put in enclosures that don't provide adequate cooling. Problem is, most external drives are put in enclosures that provide far less than ideal cooling (and the drives wind up literally baking to death over time). Best solution is to build your own, with an enclosure like this one:

Newegg.com - Rosewill RX-358-S SLV (Silver) 3.5" SATA to USB & eSATA Ext. Enclosure w/Int.80mm fan

That enclosure has a nice, big 80mm fan that generously blasts cool air directly at the hard drive, and cools quite well. Put any decent hard drive in there, and you should have a nice, reliable external drive. I suggest avoiding Maxtor and Seagate drives nowadays. Currently, I favor Hitachi drives. They run quite cool.