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.