Lacie provides a well-branded line of external enclosures and NAS and backup storage solutions. We recommend against any Lacie purchases because their solutions can fail without any warning and Lacie support will enthusiastically provide no support at all.
It is important to be clear that Lacie is not the supplier of the actual hard drives. Typically the drives are from Seagate or Western Digital. Lacie packages these third-party drives into an enclosure with Lacie electronics that generally run an open source server on top of a variant of Linux. The Lacie electronics allow for network attachment via ethernet, USB and in some models eSATA.
We have purchased Lacie products and for the most part have found them good performers as NAS solutions.
However, Lacie has a very weak commitment to supporting their products.
Most recently we again experienced a failure with a 1TB LaCie ETHERNET BIG DISK.
We say “again” because the identical failure occurred in January of 2009, so when the identical symptoms recurred in 2010 we had direct experience to guide us.
In 2009 the solution was to purchase a new power supply from Lacie and the solution worked.
But at the time it was not Lacie who provided the solution.
Instead, a search of the internet reveals that there are dozens of Lacie customers experiencing the identical problem:
The symptoms are that merely connecting the power supply results in the drive enclosure giving a steady blue power on light with no ability to turn it off, reset it with prolonged button pressing and no recognition of the drive. It happens without warning and without any obvious cause.
Depressing the power for ten seconds or longer is Lacie’s method of resetting the enclosures.
The health of the drives is rarely at issue and this is verifiable by removing one of the drives and connecting it as an internal drive. The drive will be discovered by the system and could be formatted and used.
Of course the entire point of purchasing the unit is to provide backup storage so formatting could be catastrophic if no other backups exist.
Indeed, in the course of one trouble ticket, Lacie opined on how important it is to keep backups of all data in case recovering the Lacie product resulted in total data loss. Which is ironic and completely unhelpful when the product with the trouble is in fact the backup.
When the exact set of symptoms recurred in 2010 we submitted a ticket with Lacie support purely in the hope that they had addressed the problem they had known about since it first occurred with us and revealed in further research, they had known about since 2007 or 2008. Instead of having done anything at all the Lacie support response was to direct us to a data recovery business.
Now, if you have a Lacie product that contains a single drive you may be okay. There is a good chance that you can extract the drive from the Lacie enclosure, connect it to a computer and using one of several techniques recover the data. If the Lacie product is a server-based solution that runs on a Linux kernel then you will need to connect the drive to a system that runs Linux to access the data, but this can be done easily from a variety of boot CDs or windows-hosted Linux installations.
However, the real problems come if your Lacie product contains more than one drive — which is very typical. Ours contained two Seagate 500 gigabyte drives.
When the Lacie device contains more than one drive, the drives are RAIDed to act as a single drive. In this case, neither drive can be used without reformatting.
Lacie’s technical support solution to this problem is advise their customers to pay a third party data recovery company to recover the data.
We have identified at least 28 instances of users reporting and seeking help for this problem yet Lacie either is unable or unwilling to diagnose it.
It is clear that the problem is a Lacie technology problem, not a user-generated one. Yet Lacie has entirely ignored the problem for at least two years of which we are aware.
Their support responses border on defensive and are without question completely unhelpful.
When the problem is initially reported in a ticket from a customer, there is no recognition from Lacie that this problem has occurred in their experience and instead they set the customer off on a support experience as if it were the first time this had ever happened.
Even if Lacie has never bothered to try to diagnose what causes their products to suddenly turn into bricks, ethically they should inform a customer of the track record of the problem to give the customer some context why they are simply being told to go to a data recovery business. By omitting the known issue from the support response, the customer is misled into thinking they are dealing with a unique issue which generally leads to wasted resources trying to troubleshoot.
It is also at the bare minimum misleading for Lacie to imply or flatly state that the drives in the enclosure have failed, when they know from experience that this is almost never the case with the described symptoms. The only rationale for such customer abuse would seem to be an attempt to shift responsibility from the Lacie technology to the drive manufacturers.
Given this track record, you purchase Lacie products at your own risk — or worse, the risk of your clients.
For god’s sake do not rely on Lacie products for critical data backup.
