Lacie Big Disk failure - i have a very expensive brick sitting on my desk and don't know what to do with it...

[cobair]

Hi - long story short is i have a 1TB Lacie hard disk that has failed and is not covered by warranty (even longer story!) Basically after months of discussion and sending back and forth to Lacie they tell me the internal computer has failed. I now have several hundred dollars worth of brick sitting on my desk!. Thing is its got two good disks inside it (2 x 500GB) that I could use in something else. I'm a bit of a noob at all this and was wondering if someone could advise me? I originally bought the Lacie to stream my video/sound files to a PS3 from my computer (mac G5 intel) via a mac Airport Extreme Base Station. Can I put the drives in another enclosure? Will they go in my mac? I've got a Lacie firewire drive sitting on my desk that hasn't given an ounce of trouble in over 3 years. Any advice on what to do is greatly appreciated...

 

[markr]

First: I am pretty sure that there is a way to salvage your data, IF that is what you want to do. It might cost you $$ though. Think of it like this: if a government agency wanted to get some 'secret-to-you' data off of those hard drives, they absolutely would be able to. I just recently read that they have recovered data from a hard drive from the Challenger Space Shuttle that was found in (I believe) a river in Texas. LaCie probably even offered to fix your unit, I'm guessing.

 

But you don't mention wanting to recover data. You mention wanting to remedy the 'brick' situation that you have now by using the hard drives that make up most of that 'brick'. Yep. I'm pretty sure that you can save and reuse those drives in a number of ways. I am not familiar with what type of HDDs that LaCie uses inside their assemblies - they could be PATA, SATA or another type - most likely SATA if it is a newer unit.

 

This is kind of an involved situation to handle from a long-distance without real-time video to help us out if you are indeed a noob, as you say. There are lots of details to consider - too many to describe here. Do you have any geek friends near where you live? Perhaps a small local computer shop that would love to charge you $5 or $10 bucks to give you some visual pointers and advice - or even put them in a computer for you? This would be the simplest way, barring your just breaking down and learning a bit about computer hardware inner workings.

 

As far as I know though, you should be able to just open the case, observe good ESD practices (use good electrical shock prevention practices to protect the drive electronics - easy to do -), put the drives themselves into another device, reformat them and .... just use them. This is actually very easy to do, but not so easy to describe without being there.

 

markr

"There are only two kinds of people: Those who understand binary, and those who don't."

 

[alrad2002]

Hi!

 

If they're SATA, have a look at this: http://www.drobo.com

 

Cheers!

 

allen

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hey Cobair - Welcome to Computer Audiophile. As the previous guys mentioned, there are a number fo things you can do here. Do you just want to get a new enclosure and put the hard drives into that and be done or do you want to put them into a desktop like your Mac?

 

Let us know and we'll get you through this one. You may be a noob, but you're a step ahead of many others since you at least posted the question here!

 

[Wavelength]

I would suggest getting a hard drive enclosure from Other World.

 

Tell them what happened and see if they have a enclosure that will work. They are very knowledgable in this area:

 

http://www.macsales.com/

 

Thanks

Gordon

 

[cobair]

Wow - you guys are amazing! Thanks heaps for the advice ... I've been away for the last couple of days and was delighted to come back to some really useful responses. OK - I should mention "total noob" is possibly a bit of an exaggeration. I did once replace a HDD in a mac ibook and that was a real roll up the sleeves and don't breath kind of operation (for me anyway!) I've found out they are SATA drives (2 x 500GB) I'm thinking I might be able to drop them into an enclosure with firewire connection (thanks for the link)? Or would the drives plug into my mac? What about the PS3? (I'm thinking the Lacies would be 3.5" - pretty sure PS3 needs 2.5"?) Data recovery is not an issue - I haven't even used the drive. i should mention that I bought the Lacie (brand new in box) on ebay from what appeared to be a legitimate Australian seller (I'm in Oz). Found out from Lacie that the unit is an overseas model and I'm not covered by local warranty. Its too expensive to send to the USA so basically I'm screwed.

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hey cobair - You could drop the drive into an enclosure or you Mac is you have a Mac Pro with the open drive bays that support your SATA disks. I'm willing to bet your drives won't work in the PS3, but I don't have real good experience with the PS3.

 

Here are some nice external enclosures http://www.cooldrives.com/firen.html

 

[Thunktank]

I had a shuttle PC that kept corrupting a SATA drive (bad raid controller), I got so fed up with it that took it out and replaced it with an IDE. I bought a USB SATA enclosure of of Ebay (sorry is that a four letter word to you now?) for the sum of £10 including postage. Dropping drives into external cases is pretty easy, if you get it wrong your not likely to damage anything, you just have to open it up correct your mistake and Voila!

 

Paul

 

[davip]

 

At the risk of adding nothing to the discussion can I draw attention to a previous post where I detail the years of experience I have had with Lacie drives and why NO-ONE should consider using them in an audio capacity:

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/node/29

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/node/407

 

cheers,

Dave

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

You can never warn people about LaCie too much :-)