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Ah, what can be done in less than 48 hours...
A while back I bought 3 LaCie 2TB drives. They were from the same batch (you can tell by the serial numbers).
I honestly can't say how long ago I bought them - Maybe 1.5 years. They were the ones in the tall, long case each of which had 2x 1TB sata drives (all of the drives are Hitachi model HDT721010SLA360 - Manufactured FEB 2009).
It was >1 year ago, one of them failed. It was in warranty, but LaCie was really bitchy about replacing it and I wanted the data on the drive. They said they would replace the "drive" but not put the drives in them from my failed drive.
I took a "good" one apart and marked each drive - Front and Rear.
Removed drives.
Took drives from dead drive (and marked as above but also a big red X in magicmarker).
Put drives in the case with the known good controller, hooked it up (firewire 800) and - Everything was there! I didn't loose any files.
Copied all the data to a new drive (Samsung has been treating me well).
Replaced original drives in the box with the known good controller and all was good.
I called LaCie and asked about getting a new controller and they essentially told me to go to heck - No Way....
So - That left me with 2 LaCie 2TB drives. And the 1TB Hitachi drives that were in the "bad" enclosure formatted out fine as individual drives. I copied the data I recovered to them and "filed" them in my closet (backups!) and am using the Samsung as my "online" drive.
Two days ago a second LaCie 2TB drive went down. Since I had 2 left I went through the same process as described above (switching drives) since I had the other drive box with a good controller. This time, although DiskWarrior reported the drive as "good" and rebuilt the directory with no errors reported, a few files wouldn't copy over to another drive.
I tried Data Rescue and it choked on a few files. I was giving me some ungodly number of hours to recover the files (like weeks).
I used CarbonCopyCloner to clone the drive limiting it to the data files rather than a full clone. CarbonCopyCloner uses rsync and when it comes to a file it can't read it logs the file name and goes on to the next file. I recovered 1,485 GB out of 1,508 GB. It took CarbonCopyCloner about 20 hours to recover the data *but* I was recovering them to a 5400RPM (slow) Samsung "green" drive connected by USB 2.0 so had I been recovering them to a firewire 800 drive it would have finished up a lot quicker.
Now I pulled up Data Rescue again. Since I had a list of files CCC couldn't read I told Data Rescue to try to recover just those individual files. Data Rescue gave an estimated time of something like 8 hours but came down to 3 hours. I just started that process about an hour ago but it is reporting about 40% done. However, since it's still working I don't know if all the files will be readable or not. BUT - So far the files it has recovered all work fine. They're not critical files (essentially incrementals) so if Data Rescue doesn't work out I'm not missing much.
So - Now I'm down to only 1 LaCie 2TB drive. In both cases of failed drives, the drives themselves are OK. The LaCie controller failed.
That's a 66% failure rate of the LaCie controller in less than 2 years!
I have a drive ordered from NewEgg and will copy the ones from my the last working LaCie 2TB as soon as it gets here and "retire" it.
Controllers should not fail so soon. Two out of 3 failing in under 1.5 years isn't a happy, secure thought.
That said - I have an old LaCie 1TB drive which is several years old and is still working fine. I use it weekly to clone my iMac internal drive as a bootable drive (and, of course, test to make sure I can boot from it). So - It's not normally even plugged in and turned on other than once a week for few hours. Since I also have a TimeMachine drive running all the time (a Western Digital 1.5TB drive), I think I have all my bases covered there.
I do have a rather new LaCie 2TB firewire 800 drive (the short, fat one) with a bunch of files on it. I think it uses laptop drives. Even though it is relatively new I plan to "decommission" that one this week after copying files off of it onto another drive. I have no intention of a bad controller screwing things up again and trusting LaCie's controllers is just asking for trouble.
EDIT ADD:
1. As I was typing this Data Rescue has finished recovering the files CCC skipped as bad. All the files are OK so in the end I didn't loose any data!
2. The drives LaCie drives I had that went bad were not "working" drives. That is, I copied files to them for storage and occasionally I would read a file from them, but 99% of the time they just sit there. No serious disk IO going on.
3. Data Rescue obviously works on striped raid drives.
Ah, what can be done in less than 48 hours...
A while back I bought 3 LaCie 2TB drives. They were from the same batch (you can tell by the serial numbers).
I honestly can't say how long ago I bought them - Maybe 1.5 years. They were the ones in the tall, long case each of which had 2x 1TB sata drives (all of the drives are Hitachi model HDT721010SLA360 - Manufactured FEB 2009).
It was >1 year ago, one of them failed. It was in warranty, but LaCie was really bitchy about replacing it and I wanted the data on the drive. They said they would replace the "drive" but not put the drives in them from my failed drive.
I took a "good" one apart and marked each drive - Front and Rear.
Removed drives.
Took drives from dead drive (and marked as above but also a big red X in magicmarker).
Put drives in the case with the known good controller, hooked it up (firewire 800) and - Everything was there! I didn't loose any files.
Copied all the data to a new drive (Samsung has been treating me well).
Replaced original drives in the box with the known good controller and all was good.
I called LaCie and asked about getting a new controller and they essentially told me to go to heck - No Way....
So - That left me with 2 LaCie 2TB drives. And the 1TB Hitachi drives that were in the "bad" enclosure formatted out fine as individual drives. I copied the data I recovered to them and "filed" them in my closet (backups!) and am using the Samsung as my "online" drive.
Two days ago a second LaCie 2TB drive went down. Since I had 2 left I went through the same process as described above (switching drives) since I had the other drive box with a good controller. This time, although DiskWarrior reported the drive as "good" and rebuilt the directory with no errors reported, a few files wouldn't copy over to another drive.
I tried Data Rescue and it choked on a few files. I was giving me some ungodly number of hours to recover the files (like weeks).
I used CarbonCopyCloner to clone the drive limiting it to the data files rather than a full clone. CarbonCopyCloner uses rsync and when it comes to a file it can't read it logs the file name and goes on to the next file. I recovered 1,485 GB out of 1,508 GB. It took CarbonCopyCloner about 20 hours to recover the data *but* I was recovering them to a 5400RPM (slow) Samsung "green" drive connected by USB 2.0 so had I been recovering them to a firewire 800 drive it would have finished up a lot quicker.
Now I pulled up Data Rescue again. Since I had a list of files CCC couldn't read I told Data Rescue to try to recover just those individual files. Data Rescue gave an estimated time of something like 8 hours but came down to 3 hours. I just started that process about an hour ago but it is reporting about 40% done. However, since it's still working I don't know if all the files will be readable or not. BUT - So far the files it has recovered all work fine. They're not critical files (essentially incrementals) so if Data Rescue doesn't work out I'm not missing much.
So - Now I'm down to only 1 LaCie 2TB drive. In both cases of failed drives, the drives themselves are OK. The LaCie controller failed.
That's a 66% failure rate of the LaCie controller in less than 2 years!
I have a drive ordered from NewEgg and will copy the ones from my the last working LaCie 2TB as soon as it gets here and "retire" it.
Controllers should not fail so soon. Two out of 3 failing in under 1.5 years isn't a happy, secure thought.
That said - I have an old LaCie 1TB drive which is several years old and is still working fine. I use it weekly to clone my iMac internal drive as a bootable drive (and, of course, test to make sure I can boot from it). So - It's not normally even plugged in and turned on other than once a week for few hours. Since I also have a TimeMachine drive running all the time (a Western Digital 1.5TB drive), I think I have all my bases covered there.
I do have a rather new LaCie 2TB firewire 800 drive (the short, fat one) with a bunch of files on it. I think it uses laptop drives. Even though it is relatively new I plan to "decommission" that one this week after copying files off of it onto another drive. I have no intention of a bad controller screwing things up again and trusting LaCie's controllers is just asking for trouble.
EDIT ADD:
1. As I was typing this Data Rescue has finished recovering the files CCC skipped as bad. All the files are OK so in the end I didn't loose any data!
2. The drives LaCie drives I had that went bad were not "working" drives. That is, I copied files to them for storage and occasionally I would read a file from them, but 99% of the time they just sit there. No serious disk IO going on.
3. Data Rescue obviously works on striped raid drives.
