Lacie pocket raid.. HVX capturing in the field made easy

$800 smackers....ewwww. You're right, not for LaCies track record. The idea is interesting, but so not worth for the gb to $ ratio you get from carrying a slighty larger drive to set.

I have one of their older D2 120gb drives that I bought probably over 3 years ago. After 2 years the solder point on the power connection failed. La Cie refused to do anything about. They wouldn't even SELL me a new casing. And they were rude to top it off. I had to go Compusa and get this crappy enclosure with stupid color changing lights on it because it was the only firewire casing they had. And they drive is noisy as hell I i know they have since been using quiet drives.)
So, like any other smart consumer I took my business elsewhere.
 
ha ha yeah that sucks Sarlacc.. I personally only had 1 lacie drive fail... but even just saying that sounds wrong.
 
Jarred Land said:
Hey check this thing out.. pretty cool solution for long time recording in the field via capturing via an NLE/DVRACK/ etc...

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10731

now lacie has had crappy service record in the past, would be great if they got past that.
Click to expand...
Yeh i started a post on this drive earlier in the hardware forum where I included a link to this review of the drive: http://www.barefeats.com/hard74.html

I too question the reliability of Lacies, one of mine also had a power supply solder point break. I had to pry the thing open and resolder it. Otherwise I had one other Lacie drive mechanism fail after 1 year of light use and another that lasted 3.5 years of heavy use.

Now this new mini raid is based on 2.5 in. mechanisms and if the cooling is handled ok then they should be more durable provided they are mounted in the case right. Tough call on buying one but them things sure look rightous - and me being a fiend of transportability its hard not to give em a second look even at that price.

Oh PS: If you have a lacie power supply and you want to take it with you, unplug the wall cord from where it goes into the powersupply itself. That is where a serious weak stress point is in the powersupply and where torque on the cord could cause a solder point break.
 
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Jarred Land said:
Hey check this thing out.. pretty cool solution for long time recording in the field via capturing via an NLE/DVRACK/ etc...

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10731

now lacie has had crappy service record in the past, would be great if they got past that.
Click to expand...


This drive is only 5400rpm, and has a throughput of "up to 82 Mbps". I doubt it would work as an NLE/Rack solution to capture directly onto the HDD.

What's the throughput needed when shooting DVCPRO HD onto a HDD?

The drive looks pretty cool. I've had Lacie drives since they were blue, plastic door stoppers. I've had a few die on me, so make sure all you data is backed up. Last problem I had with a Lacie was a bad firewire bridge, which Lacie would not repair. Oddly, that drive will mount on a PC, but not on my Apple PB G4.

MC
 
It claims to be for DV/HDV and some SD work. If they aren't saying HD I doubt it will work for playback.
If all you want is location storage, it could be a decent solution.

Then you gotta read all the problems people have had with the company. That alone makes me not want to give them my money for future headaches.
Then with the seemingly poor quality history, it's yet another reason for looking elsewhere. I buy hard drives to protect my clients and my files. I don't like throwing the dice on marginal products that my reputation is depending on.
 
I don't know about Lacie's quality control, it could very well be garbage, but the documentation says up to 82 MBps, not Mbps, that's a big difference (8x the difference). A full DVCPROHD stream is around 12.5 MBps, so the drive should be able to handle it, easily.
 
Haven't had experience with this product, but I can't trust LaCie drives at all. Out of about 8 or 9 that I currently run, half of them have failed at some point within the first year of usage. Luckily I was using those LaCies as my clone drives, so when they went down, I didn't loose anything.

I hope for their sake that quality control is better on these new drives, but I'll wait to hear other users' experiences.
 
umm, how big are each of the drives inside this thing? and is it raid 0 or 1 ?

Cause if it's raid 1 doesn't that mean that half the space is used for bakcup, so you're only left with the storage capacity of ONE of the drives.

And if it's raid 0, isn't that twice the chance of drive failure?

And are two raided 5400rpm drives al that much faster than a single 7200rpm drive?

This won't work hooked up to the hvx obviously, but to a laptop only?

Also, I have had excelent service from the lacie repair center here in Toronto. I've been using their drives for years and had to have two repaird on seperate occasions. No problems with their service.
 
As I read this thread I am downloading my P2 cards to my 320 Little Big Disk. I picked one up a couple of weeks ago before starting a job on "Little Cayman" a small island with 100 people on it. I did not want to aquire the PStore because of the capacity and I needed much more capacity than the Smartdisk or Gtech firewire powered drives. So far it is rockin along... but damn do I need a P2 Store. For sure the workflow must include 2 sets of 8 gig cards and a P2 Store. Today i missed a spectacular sunset because of the lack of extra storage.
 
Morgan_Rozender said:
[...] if it's raid 0, isn't that twice the chance of drive failure? [...]
Click to expand...
This is enough to scare me away from this drive, LaCie states on the data sheet "built-in RAID 0" which I think is a bad idea in the field, especially since I have no way to check the SMART status of the drives. For capture from the HVX, you don't really need the speed of the RAID 0 and thus makes more sense to me to stick with single, smaller, cheaper, drive, especially if you're uploading from the camera direct, as it will only make use of so much of the drive.
 
Funny how everyone has their favorite and most hated drive or peripheral company. I have about 45 LaCie drives, ranging from 160GB to 1 TB bought over the last 3 years. All being used for video and photoshop slaves.

The only failure I have had is with one of internal Seagate mechanisms. Not LaCie's fault. I have had other drives from Maxtor and Seagate too and have pretty good luck with them. The luck might be a key factor, or what I do to insure luck.

Often our impression of a piece of hardware relates more to when it died/misbehaved than it actually failing. When a drive or component dies and everything is backed up and a redundant system is in place, than things tend to roll off your back a lot more easily than if it was your one and only, and project X is on it and due in two hours. Then you pretty much hate life and the thing connected with it.

Or, I could have said - BE PARANOID and BACK UP OFTEN. Because stuff fails, falls and farts in real life all the time.

--

Rob
 
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