Rating: 
Summary: LaCie BigDisk is trouble
Review: I work at a graphics company and we have large files that are stored on our server. Because of budget constraints we bought a couple of 500GB drives hoping to use them for weekly backups of our work. They have been nothing but trouble from the start. Often after properly disconnecting the drives and reconnecting them the drive is read as being unformatted. This has happened multiple times we still have our original data but will not trust the drives as a back up solution. And to cap it all off the service from Lacie is horrible we have called them several times without any real resolutions to our problems.
Rating: 
Summary: Western Digital drives in Lacie
Review: It is my understanding that the LaCie Big Disk hard drives use western digital hard (WD)drives...I know that the terabyte model yet to be released has an internal stack of 4x250gb WD DRIVES. I have used WD DRIVES for several years without a hitch and I am waiting with anticipation for the termabyte external hard drive.
Rating: 
Summary: Very slow response from Customer Support:(
Review: Note: if you connecting via firewire, that this drive will not work after upgrading to WinXP SP2. Requires a firmware upgrade to even be recognised. Luckily I have a PC running XP SP1 which recognised the HD and was therefore able to upgrade the HD firmware. I found this out by chance, it is now 5 days since I called in with this issue to Lacie's tech support and I still haven't heard back.
Rating:
Summary: A mixed bag
Review: The LaCie drives are a mixed bag, being extremely quiet and very fast. I use mine with a usb 2.0 card with my laptop and the external drives are actually faster than the internal drive.
However, there are problems that may or may not be due to LaCie. I have also had an ongoing problem with the drives losing data and being recognized by Windows. After a lot of checking, the problems seem to be simple, yet very destructive. A notebook card protrudes out a good bit over the side of the computer. This has led to ocassional bumps to the card that likely have been the cause of cracks to the bottom of several usb 2.0 and firewire 800 cards. I mention this only to alert anyone who is frustrated by trying to figure out these data losses. LaCie apparently has never encountered this problem. Also, a heavy firewire 800 cable will frequently fall out of the firewire 800 card and that also causes data loss. This data loss theorectically should not be happening, as I have write caching disabled which makes it unecessary to use the "safe removal icon" in the notification area. Whether the loss of data despite write caching being disabled is a Windows problem or a LaCie drive problem is something I have not yet determined. Although I may buy another LaCie drive, that purchase is clouded by the inforgivable lack of information from LaCie. They do have users e-mail addresses and could easily have sent out the firmware update information that is necessary after XP service pack 2 is installed. The reason this is so critical is that the firmware update must be done on a computer NOT using service pack 2. This effectively makes my drives unable to use the firewire connections anymore because I did not find this out until AFTER the XP service pack 2 installation and upon finding that the drives had yet another problem. Basically, these drives can not be counted upon for any data that is not backed up elsewhere, which makes their value very questionable.
Rating:
Summary: Drive Fails, Data Lost, Multiple Instances
Review: These drives should be avoided.Our laboratory, and several we work with, have made a big commitment to these drives. We have bought more than a dozen of them. Several times, after working fine for a while, the drive disappears; it does not come up on the desktop. Disk Manager shows it as unallocated. LaCie tech support is not acknowledging the problem. All they could offer was try a data recovery program. I did; it didn't work. We have lost lots of data on theses drives.
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