I commented upon it here: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...374#post182374

ie: La Cie deliberately give their 160 GB external drives a minimal cache so they're both unreliable, slow & noisy. I've had to reformat mine at least half a dozen times in the past 14 months. I phoned La Cie asking & telling that I'd obviously got a lemon since my 250 GB drive was so much different in performance. There's no comparison. My 160 GB drive has my iTunes library on-board. iTunes continuously has problems reading from it & skips songs after about 10 secs. Wow thank you La Cie. I was told by apple resellers it would be fine for the purpose. That was until La Cie support let me in on the truth. It is deliberately designed with far less cache than the 250 GB drive to make it unreliable. I think that's called marketing. But if it is, then it's shifty, nasty, conspiring, & particularly/especially deceptive. Oh thank you very much. I've certainly learnt a lesson thank you La Cie. Hopefully other gnutella users can learn the same lesson without having to pay for it! Let me pass this message on ... unsponsored by La Cie.

Everytime I connect the 160 GB drive my computer slows down. Oh I wonder why La Cie. Gads if only the french could speak chinese or another couple of languages I could be a bit more definitive in my description & thoughts. And gads english is my main language. Dare I say it. Forum rules restrict further comments!

BTW in the 1st 9 mths I used the drive I lost mammoth amounts of data thru directory corruption. And that's one of the points. The 160 drive is continuously needing repair. Thanks for the multiple GB's of lossed data La Cie. Some of it my profesional work. Cheers!!!

I forgot to mention that's a firewire 400 drive I'm refering to.

Has someone hacked your account or why are you badmouthing people in here that have no chance to defend themselves? If the drive is damaged return it but don't blather nonsense on
random forums. Is your 250 GB an external drive too? You can hardly compare an external drive with an internal one. I would be surprised if your operating system or even your host hardware has bugs/problems with its FireWire support.

LOTR

I am somewhat surprised about the experience you have had with Lacie 160GB external drive, as I have said in the past, I use one of these too. I bought mine back in April 2004 and I have never had a days trouble with it.

I will admit that my usage of this equipment is different to yours, I use my drive as a storage and LW sharing facilitator and I can't say that I have any "computer slowing down" problems. I also play my film clips and some of my music files from this drive and again I don't have the problems you are having.

I can only presume that you, as a musician, may have pushed this device beyond it's design parameters. I say this because I know, without knowing the intricate detail, that they have specialised computer equipment specially designed for use by musicians. This equipment is far more robust and constructed for silent running, i.e. recording studio use, and is therefore much more expensive than items designed for domestic use.

LOTR, I know you are a very experienced person when it comes to computer equipment and the stuff you don't know about you have the skill to research into. Therefore, I would suggest that you trust your professional work to "musician grade" equipment only, which is designed to take the kinds of stresses and strains a musician will put on it.



UK Bob

PS. I use the USB version.

PPS. Sorry about your experience with this product my experience with it has been excellent.

Hyper-kun I did suggest I was reaching the boundaries of the forum rules. I definitely don't have anything against la cie support, they were very, very helpful & gave me a lot of good advice which included re-formatting it differently. I also liked their honesty in advice & the facts about the product.

I used the device purely for back-up purposes in the 1st 3/4 of the time I had it. So considering it wasn't connected to the computer very much, there didn't seem to be any valid reason for the constant problems.

I contacted La Cie 13 mths after purchase inquiring whether I might by any small chance still fall within or be considered for guarantee period. (at the time I couldn't remember the specific date I purchased it & couldn't find the receipt for some reason ... I generally keep such things until well after the guarantee period. But the mac store where I purchased it would validify my purchase in any case.)

I will take La Cie's advice & see if there's any difference in performance. If there's not, then I either got a lemon, ie: this particular one wasn't produced as well as the others, or it somehow got damaged during it's transportation from production to outlet store.

But I still don't take back my point that not all La Cie devices are produced equally. Why not give all their drives an equal amount of cache. And yes, cache apparently makes a big difference in performance.

ukbobboy01 mine is Firewire only. Perhaps the USB ones are better. If my 250 GB drive wasn't so much better then I wouldn't be complaining. And I might also look at my particular computer. ButI've used it on 2 mac G4 computers so I don't think it's the system or hardware that the device is connected to. Whilst I say that, the USB cards on these particular model macs are only USB1 so an external USB device would be incredibly slow which is why I didn't go for a USB or USB/Firewire optional interfacing storage medium.

Thanks for your thoughts ukbobboy01. But it hadn't been over-used & didn't use it for real-time recording. I saw plenty of advice on the Final Cut Pro forums about being wary of using basic external drives for capture so I keep that point to heart. I 1st noticed problems with it within a couple of months of using it. If only I had been bright enough to contact La Cie back then. I purchased it 3/4 way thru 2004. Not until I bought the 250 drive did I notice that there was a major difference. I use the 250 drive now as a backup drive. I'm thinking perhaps I should swap their purposes. But even if I do that, I would be paranoid I'd lose data as I had previously on the 160 drive as a simple backup device. Well, if I were rich I would purchase another 250 drive & dump the 160 drive. I did get particular discounts for both drives I bought with some haggling & the fact I purchase a lot of stuff thru that mac store.

BTW when I said the drive slowed the computer down, it was when I was/am using it as a share drive for either LW or another p2p program. It even made my other p2p program run very slowly for chat, etc; DC. Chat would take like 20-30 secs to show up in the program or on the chat line should I say. So my chat responses would be very slow.

(This thread is one of frustration as a person might realise reading between the lines. Losing important data is a major issue when there doesn't seem to be any valid reason for this happening constantly. Since changing from a backup to a music/share medium, iTunes finds it difficult to not only read the songs, but also the id3 tags.) As said, I'll reformat it once I'm sure I've totally backed up all material from it. I'll see how it goes from there. Maybe I'll post back with very positive remarks after yet another reformat.

you know...the type of post LOTR made is the only pay we Moderators get....I've changed my sig a few times and made such posts before...as noted, it's the only pay we get (being able to bend the rulez a bit to make a much needed point)

I guess you're the type who just bends over and takes it like a man, eh?

If you think whining in here will solve anything, go ahead. There's a difference between whining in the public and doing the same in private though. Problems are best solved using facts. Does such a post help anyone but the poster himself? If you search the web for opinions, you'll see that very few people praise any product, most just complain. That's simply how humans tick, the complainers are always the loudest. It doesn't help anyone though. You don't know whether these people lie or not. You don't know how stupid they are. You don't know how they treat their hardware. Maybe the delivery service simply dropped it? It's just noise and nothing else.
That is unless I see some technical facts like transfer rates, data from diagnose software, interrupt load during transfers, results from stress testing etc. Of course, most end-users (especially on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X) cannot provide such data and it's impossible for them to diagnose the cause of an issue.

By the way, recently I lost a few Gigs of data too. Is the hardware at fault? Not at all, it was caused by a tiny partition overlap that went unnoticed for a long time and only caused trouble once the other partition filled up completely. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would have blaimed it on the disk especially with all this noise about "bad harddisk quality" nowadays. I never had hardware trouble with any of my harddisks, so I really wonder what others are doing with theirs. A simple explanation might be "too much heat". This could even be caused by using FAT filesystems with their inherit fragmentation issue which causes far more seeking and thus more stress for the disk than some well-designed filesystem.

Peerless, if you don't stick to your own rules, you have simply no credibility. Actually, what you write confirms again my believe that there a very few people that make good "moderators". It requires a lot of self-discipline and impartiality.

Either you're fine with not getting payment or you're not, but don't use it as an excuse to grant yourself privileges. Just listen to yourself. You start sounding like some high and mighty politician or manager.

I don't have such equipment at my fingertips. lol But I have timed it using the clock on the computer as a rough guide. I did it out of curiousity but I didn't note it or think too much about it. But I can redo it to be specific. The difference in speed is considerable. There's nothing like waiting to finish copying 80+ GB. As I said earlier, the 160 GB drive I originally used simply as a backup drive. Once it was finished copying, I wouldn't touch it again for perhaps some weeks. That's 10-40 mins use depending on size of data to backup. The 250 GB drive does it in almost no time. What's more there's no or almost no sound during the process. The 160 drive seems to stutter every now & again. It sounds like zip disks if you've ever used one. Especially very old ones. I don't understand why that with such little use the directory would become corrupt so quickly. Sometimes I didn't use it for a few months. Now I use it a few times a week.
But as I said at the end of my last post, I will re-format it differently to how it was before & see if there's any improvement. If I can get it at least closer to the performance of the 250 drive then I'll delete this thread.

Edit: I forgot to mention, I can't copy more than about 2 GB or less at a time to it or else there's copy errors. But I did note to myself sub-consiously how fast it copied per minute out of however mins to copy a couple of gig ... the rate at which it copies is so so much slower.

I guess I should also add, whilst using it as a share drive, if I do that, it not only slows the computer but I only get some hits for the files, no uploads. I doubt people can upload from it. And that's with about 120 GB music. Very unlike how it was before I moved the files off the computer.

This is The Lounge which was designed for generally chat issues, or p2p stuff. Opinions, etc. ie: any topic which didn't necessarily relate to p2p & was quite open yet falling within forum guidelines. As stated, I'm "more than happy" with the 250 GB drive ... same company ... & their support is excellent! (If you didn't want to know about the topic then fine. It's about a specific model or ones experience with it.)

Please justify this statement....I obviously have no great problem with no paycheck, but I have made some posts regarding what I consider to be very bad customer service/products...in places that were appropriate...have others done so also????...most definitely yes...if said posts were in an inappropriate place, then they got moved, otherwise they got left....


now...what exactly are these 'own rules' you are talking about?????...and you better back it up right quickly...

you know what happens when ppl keep quiet about bad products???...they keep getting sold to unsuspecting consumers...you know what happens when ppl don't talk about bad service???...customers keep getting screwed...

The_Point being honest, accurate reports of bad (or good) products/support is not only good, it's damn near needed in this world...of course a rough control freak (I base this on your nationality and previous nick) like you is probably incapable of understanding this...

Who is the control freak? Just because I say something you don't like and disagree with your statement, you think it's appropriate to check my nationality? Besides, what it is my nationality? Did you check the IP address with "whois"? What ever country it is mapped to, what does it tell you about my nationality? What tells you I'm not posting using an open proxy? Maybe you checked the User-Agent header which makes me nicely traceable, doesn't it?

I find your implied thread "I know who you are and I'm gonna tell mommy" quite disgusting. Thanks for confirming my opinion about the average "moderator" once again though.

By the way, the control freaks sit in the USA, not here. But why are you blathering about nationalities? You really do think that it tells everything - or anything - about a person, don't you? It's really sad that people think that way even nowadays. Well at least you didn't bring up my religion, my gender, my skin color or the like.

Anyway, back to LOTR, look what was written:
"La Cie deliberately give their 160 GB external drives a minimal cache so they're both unreliable, slow & noisy."

Well, the cache size is certainly mentioned in the specifications, so what ever size it is, this should be a surprise. However, the size of the cache has _zero_ to do with reliability. A small cache might make the disk slow, yes but it heavily depends on the usage pattern. With mostly linear access, it doesn't matter at all. If there's mostly random access it can make a big difference. However, caching is also something the operating system does. So unless your machine has only 32 MB RAM or the like the cache size should be a little concern except for file servers (I don't talk about P2P file sharing at DSL speed). A bigger cache and less seeking can decrease the noise but it's more a question of mounting and the disk's mechanics. Besides, the noise level is usually mentioned in the specifications too. All disk vendors have such specifications available online, often even for fairly old disks (10 years or so). If you buy something in a rush, without checking whether it fits your expectations, then you can only blame yourself. I've certainly done that myself sometimes.

Their service does not seem so evil either:
"I definitely don't have anything against la cie support, they were very, very helpful & gave me a lot of good advice"

There seems to be a problem with the disk though:
"I've had to reformat mine at least half a dozen times in the past 14 months."

What were you trying to achieve with that? I virtually never format a disk more than once unless I want to use it for something completely else (e.g., bulk data vs. system disk).
If you experience data lossage with a disk and you're sure it's not the software's or the user's fault, then return it or scrap it. But never ever keep on using it for data of any worth. Especially not for backups. Of course within 14 months a lot of anger and frustration will build up but that's really your own fault then. Maybe their service was not so "good" after all or you just have not had the guts to claim your warranty.

However this sounds very weird:
"iTunes continuously has problems reading from it & skips songs after about 10 secs"

Why would such problems depend on the application? If it's really only iTunes, than it's probably doing some weird stuff. If it's any audio player, then it's likely to be an IRQ problem (sound hardware vs. firewire controller). If this happens even when copying the file, then it's really related to firewire or the disk itself in some way but it could still be a driver bug, conflict with other hardware. All this has to be investigated and tested. There are tools for this. If you have a service contract, then it's not your problem to do this - of course you'd have to send in your machine...
Otherwise, you have to check these things yourself.

You did not say whether the 250 GB disk is also an external FireWire disk. Even if it is, the 160 GB disk might support or not support some feature which causes trouble with FireWire controller or the drivers.

"Why not give all their drives an equal amount of cache."

Because cache memory is comparatively expensive. If you want it, ask for it or buy a model with more cache.

By the way, in the linked thread I just read this claim by
LOTR:

"But ignore the advert for Maxtor. I would very definitely not recommend Maxtor. Too many reports of them giving up well before time."

I have a Seagate, a Maxtor, a Samsung and a Western Digital. Never had any trouble with them. I only remember some news article about a specific problem with a certain series of IBM disks a few years ago. But the above shows exactly what I mean. Where did you read these reports? It's really nonsense to avoid a vendor completely just because there was some trouble with a certain model or series. If you would do that, you'd have to assemble your harddisks yourself. However such bad publicity sticks. Some people still prefer Intel CPUs over the AMD models just because their were some minor incompatible models in the early 90s. Nobody avoided Intel though when they had their infamous FPU-bug (2.0+2.0=3.99).

This is one my disks (an internal one):
http://www.samsung.com/Products/Hard...SV1203N_sp.htm

You see, it's only 2 MB of cache for a 120 GB too but it's silent and as fast as expected. LaCie is not producing disks anyway, inside there's just a IDE drive by Maxtor, IBM, Samsung or whoever. In your case, I would have bought an external HDD enclosure with FireWire. Then you could decide what disk to put inside and upgrade to a larger or faster one. With your monolithic all-in-one solution, you lose. It would also be easy check in that case whether it's really the disk or rather the enclosure controller respectively a problem with FireWire.

This sounds really like a 32-bit issue:
"I forgot to mention, I can't copy more than about 2 GB or less at a time to it or else there's copy errors."

That is most-definitely a software problem or you are using FAT as filesystem. I don't know what you mean with "copy errors". If the file cannot be copied because of its size, then see above. If you mean the file was copied but corrupted that's a worse issue. Of course you certainly don't want to use FAT with file sharing, at least not download to a FAT partition. The partition will fragment like hell and get really slow, no doubt.

Then you say:
"their support is excellent"

I doubt it. If your 250 GB works fine, that's cool. I expect nothing else. However, they obviously couldn't solve the problem with your 160 GB drive. That means, if everything works as expected and the vast majority of computer hardware
does this even if sub-optimally perhaps, they're OK. But if there are issue, they seem to be unable to solve it. And *that* is what matters, what makes a good vendor. Solving problems, not selling like mad. Hell, I'd rather buy crap for a fair price.

Some other user in linked thread wrote:
" i have a seagate 160GB. can't find RPM info tho. i don't think transfer rate is fast, cause it took 20 mins to transfer my rock music in, about 4,000 songs. i have 87.7GB to spare."

That's roughly 70*1024^3/20/60 bytes/second = 62634939 bytes/second. That's anything but slow for single disk and 4000 files. So I'd be rather cautious about comments on forums and other place where people can "freely" share their opinions. Just look at the specs and compare different vendor's models. This will tell you pretty well what you get for your money. You don't even have to know too much about the technical stuff, just compare the numbers. Well sure you have to know whether a small or high number is good of course but you can find explanations for that easily on the web.

By the way, I'd rather pick a 5400 RPM drive instead of a 7200 RPM one. The latter is usually much louder and the difference in transfer speed really doesn't matter that much. If RPM mattered, we'd have disks with 100000 RPM by now but even the fastest have only about 10000. They are annoyingly loud. You only want them in servers if at all and the disks get also pretty hot. Which means a shorter life-span especially if it's not properly cooled or often spinned-down (that's why you put it into servers). For what it's worth, such server disks which spin 24/7 non-stop for weeks and months may fail after a power-down because they got so hot that the temperature difference caused by turning it off chemically destroyed the lubricant and thus the mechanic.

I assume you were talking about this:
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10383

Actually, since they don't tell what disk is inside, I'd expect it to differ from purchase to purchase. They'll simply use some disk which matches more or less the incomplete specs
available from there:
http://www.lacie.com/download/datash...sche_hd_en.pdf

Another good reason to buy disk and enclosure separately.

yur a politician aren't you?


I mean really...nice job there on avoiding the query re: rulez, and my breaking of my own...

7,200 rpm discs rule all over 5,400 discs...of course, one needs to need said performance...I'll agree that yur daily run of the mill user won't really see the performance gains...I on the other hand observe a substantial boost from a faster drive....


as far as the "I know who you are and I'm gonna tell mommy" quite disgusting" statement from you...hahahaha...nice job of falling for the bait...