How robust/durable are LaCie firewire drives?
I have four of these drives (the Lacie “D2” or “Big Disk” drives.) They are great and I haven’t had a problem– and I *really* use them, lots of streaming data in and out shared via NFS to a compute cluster. That said, there are two drives in that casing that appears as one 500GB drive. I believe (someone will correct me, I am sure) that this means if one of the drives goes bad your data on both drives will be inaccessible. So you are increasing your data loss risk by 2. I’ve used them on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. My favorite part is that you can chain them using FW800. The drive is much faster than my Powerbook internal drive.
The 500 GB BigDisks are two disks in a striped RAID mode. Striping without parity reduces reliability: if one drive fails, all striped drives fail. LaCie just puts whatever drives are on the market into their enclosures. That said, LaCie makes good hard drive enclosures. I have a bunch of LaCies and they have been workhorses for me. I would buy two BigDisks and mirror them. That way you won’t lose any of your music files, and Firewire 800 gives good enough performance that you should be able to use it with a sequencer. Note that ProTools has its own hardware requirements, however.
I haven’t actually used the LaCie drives, but I’ve taken a few apart to raid them for the drives inside. I took apart one of the slightly older blue/grey firewire models the other night. They seem flimsy and ill constructed on the inside, with stock drives behind the “Warranty void if broken” seal. Perhaps they’re actually well engineered and reliable, but my geek-sense tingles when I poke at their innards and tells me that they’re over-engineered (for cost/profit ratios) and mostly marketing mojo.
I have a 500 gig USB/Firewire model sitting right next to me. I’ve had no problems with the actual data. However, the drive tends to disappear when doing multiple operations. For instance, I was just trying to copy some files from the drive while deleting some other files. Halfway through, everything locked up. I had to start over. This happens to me on both Windows XP and Linux, on two different machines. I use the USB (2.0) interface almost exclusively, so I don’t know if the same problem comes up with firewire. When I’m only doing one operation at a time, it seems to work pretty well.
