LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB

[lupin]

Anybody have any experience with the LaCie disks? How reliable are they?

I'm thinking of getting a 1TB disk. I wonder if they use a single 1TB disk in the enclosure, or several. Would it make sense to create two different partitions on a single physical disk, to attempt to create cheap mirroring backup?

I'll be using it with OSX so I wont' be limited with small partition sizes on FAT32.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10451

 

[EightySix Four]

it's multiple disks, there are no single disk 1TB's out yet.

 

[Devistater]

The 1 TB lacie is merely four 250 gig hdds in one big box that plugs in with USB. Its far cheaper just to buy a few 250 gig drives on sale and put them into your computer I dont think you can really do raid/mirroring on separate USB/firewire devices anyway. Creating multiple partitions on a single disk only protects against software failures, like a partition table failing. If the hardware dies, you lose the whole thing.
That 1TB lacie has a list price of $800, and its stripe raid 0. Which means that you quadruple your chances of catastrophic data loss (losing everything).
Whereas if you check say pricewatch for 250gb drives, it shows they start around $85. You could make an 8 drive array thats mirrored and has same capacity as the lacie, for less money. Or you could go with say a raid 5 setup where you dont have to use half the drives for a mirror, and have more drives left over for storage, but still retain the ability to lose a drive and recover.

It just depends on your needs and how much money you have to spend. Do you want fault tolerance if a drive fails? Do you want speed above all else? Do you have room for a bunch of hdds inside your case? Would a separate cheap fileserver work for you? Do you need portability so you can take the stuff from one location to another?
And as the post below mine mentions, do you want "swish" looks on your desk?

 

[TLW]

i have a 3 year old Lacie d2 200GB HDD sitting on my desk, during thoise three years its been used 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for data storage and backup, space to store my raw video from my camera etc etc - ie: it's had a pretty tough life.

it's not quiet (although i used to have a laptop and only now with my new quiet case do i notice the noise) - but it is fast, easy to use and above all else **reliable** - i'd recommend the lacie disks in general, but like the other guys have said you might as well buy 4 250GB internal drives and stick them in your PC, i'm tempted to dismantle this d2 and put the drive in mine, however the case does look a bit swish on my desk

 

[SonicIce]

define "disk". even the 500gb drives have multiple platters (right?)

 

[Leros]

Text

The whole thing is a disk. The shiny silver thing in the middle is a platter. A disk can have multiple platters.

 

[Devistater]

HDD generally stands for something like Hard Disk Drive. So the DRIVE can contain DISKS (which are platters) inside. However lots of people use some of these terms interchangably, and normally the technical distinctions dont matter.

Anyway the lacie 1 TB is four 250 gig HDDs inside (and you pay through the nose for it too, besides accepting the quadrupled chance of a catastrophic data loss the way they have it setup). There is no such thing as a commecially availible single HDD that has 1 TB on it. I think 500gig is the max on a single hdd at the moment.