petego4it Loc: NY

I have a virtually full with photos LaCie 6TB raid 0 disk running Thunderbolt 1 to an Apple desktop. Recently it stopped reliably loading shots, instead constantly recycles or searches. Initially I thought it was one of the two drives in the box so tested separately with Apple disk drive software; both test fine. Then thought it could be the cable so replaced that. Then the LaCie software driver, can't find anything new, or the raid firmware, so I put the drives into a similar back up LaCie 6TB box. Same result. Then tried on my second computer with older Apple OS. Nothing helps. Out of warranty. LaCie was bought by Seagate not long ago, seems my only hope. Any other ideas???

WayneT Loc: Paris, TN

How full is it? If you are reaching 90% or higher you could crash the drive.

petego4it Loc: NY

I'm aware that 90% or higher, (I'm at about 92%--around 400 gb of space is supposedly left) can materially slow the drive. I am not aware however that there is any relevant reason the box should crash at that point. In any case, at present I'm not trying to put more on this box but rather to get the photos I have there off and get a larger box (also planned to be a LaCie but 12 TB.). The problem continues. Unfortunately, the initial Big2 box is 2 strapped Seagate 5.25" drives running Raid 0. That complicates matters further....it seems.

WayneT Loc: Paris, TN

If I were you I would try to slowly transfer (copy) about a TB of data to a clean drive. Once moved then try to erase the files you just moved on the original drive. That will give the original drive room to reset. If that helps then start copying files to your larger array or better yet a second array. Once that's done, if you haven't done so, find a good backup company and push everything to the cloud as a second backup.

Kuzano

25 years computer consulting. Much gear teching. Worst product I ever saw... LaCie. Never saw one unless it came in for repair. LaCie was (is) not a drive company, but a drive housing company. Their electronics failed frequently. Every repair of a LaCie I performed was to extract the actual drive from the housing, put a simple USB connector on it and treat it as an external drive. Even better, hook the drive into a second interface in a real computer and go after your data.

You will generally find a Seagate or Western Digital in a LaCie housing. I do not think you will ever see the drive inside to say LaCie on it.

I think I have a few empty LaCie housings I use to keep my work bench level. Garbage.

Yes, Seagate bought LaCie, probably to get them off market because so many that failed had Seagate drives, and it was implicating good drives in a failed component.

You should also be aware that in the last decade to fifteen years, Seagate also bought 3-5 other failing drive mfrs. Quantum, Quantum Bigfoot, Maxtor and a couple of others. Seagate did not buy these companies to rescue them. WD also bought one or two. Ultimately Seagate and WD may likely merge.

Carefully, get that basic drive out of the LaCie enclosure if you can, and treat it like the good external or internal drive it likely is. LaCie never did that for any customer.

petego4it Loc: NY

Thanks for the candid input. Very unhappily, the problem is worse than that. LaCie manages the electronics and recommended using Raid 0. Raid 0 it seems is a striped approach to storage between two actual drives making it into one virtual one. Both of the Seagate drives test good. You are correct, the LaCie box is the problem. It is bad. It will be virtually impossible I'm afraid to reconstruct the striping between the two boxes even tho all the data is fine on each. This is truly an unbelievable situation. Hopefully Seagate, the new owner will aid. I have over 300,000 photos on there...

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

In addition to what Kuzano said, LaCie charges a high premium for it's branding. The primary purchaser is usually an Apple customer, and they figured they could ride on Apple's coat-tails, charging more for mediocre equipment. When you open a LaCie box, you will find a pretty low end drive. The ones that everyone else buys for 1/2 the price. It's too bad they are so greedy - they could install a better drive, like a Seagate Constellation or a WD Black or RedPro, but they don't. RAID 0 should be banned as a raid option. It's fast, but without parity, when something goes wrong you will definitely lose stuff.

Also, I am not sure where the 90% rule came from - typically, when a drive reaches 75% of actual capacity, the drive should not be asked to store more data. Poor performance sets in and only get worse as you load the drive up until you get a failure.

Kmgw9v Loc: Miami, Florida

LuCie hard drives are expensive, and they are sold in Apple stores, so they must be quality.
Right?

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Yeah, right . . .

petego4it Loc: NY

thanks. will give this idea a try. not much else is working!

petego4it Loc: NY

thanks all. Here's my solution. Thunderbolt 1&2 is going away. They've had continual connector problems, so LaCie (bought by Seagate) replaced with different in TBolt3 just out. However, I have 5 year old iMac so gulped hard and bought 2 of the last available Bolt 2 LaCie 12TB drives, around $700, being discontinued, one for main and one for back up. In this process, I also discovered default Raid 0 on my old and these new drives doesn't really have Raid safety at all. Because if one drive goes bad, the other striped one is useless and can't be rebuilt. So I had these choices: Raid 1 (half the size to access due to mirroring) or JBOD (just a bunch of drives). Not wanting to have to incur this expense again anytime soon, I've gone with JBOD, implemented with a hardware switch in the new LaCie boxes, and am rebuilding LR database using the second new box as back up; doing this after separating shots into current and history categories using each of the two drives in each box. Whew! Then use Goodsynch to keep all in fairly constant order and can simply substitute one box for the other if and when a drive goes down. So far works, faster, and fortunately was able to coax download from the old boxes...they are pretty useless now but served their 5 year time well. Contrary to the above, I do find LaCie has both made and support good products.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Buy Synology. Super reliable, and you can populate it with really good enterprise quality drives instead of the junk that goes into a LaCie box.

petego4it Loc: NY

I had a Synology. Changed to LaCie for much greater speed, reliability and design.