Lacie external thunderbolt drives. Your opinion?

A

alohype

Veteran
Those drives get pretty bad reviews on apple.com yet they're extremely popular amongst filmmakers. I'm torn apart, should I buy them? What is your experience working with them?
 
We went through a period where we had our students buy their own drives, at first we specified LaCie because our test units worked fine. Then after the students started buying them, we started having 20 to 30 percent failure rates with their drives, normally click of death, but many others with control card issues. LaCie warranty was a nightmare and most students gave up and bought a new drive, trashing the LaCie. We eventually went back to central server based storage which has worked best for students and faculty. Yes I even met with our regional LaCie sales rep, but nothing improved in the next year.

So in short, LaCie are not recommended, and banned from our department purchases!
 
Yes, it seems like the Lacie rugged drives have been very popular over the years in the production world, but I've alays heard that they were not really reliable(higher than average failure rates), which isn't really a good thing for drives with precious footage on it. I've pretty much been a Seagate guy for years and have so far only had one partial drive failure. One of my main clients (a big multi-letter network) has started to use the Sony professional portable hard drives for the producers to transport footage on. They kind of take you back in time a bit, because they come on what is basically an oversized Betacam tape case. I'm sure they're playing on everyones memory of Sony media by doing that.

ALWAYS have your important data in more than one place! And NEVER ship a drive if it is the only copy of something. It could get lost or damaged. We had one get damaged about a month ago. Thank goodness the field producer was smart enough to make a copy of it before they shipped it.
 
I have had many LaCie drives over the years, mostly the larger raid boxes, everything from fw to sub to now thunderbolt....I have recommended them and have never had any issues of any kind and neither have the people I recommended them to....Pegasus are great as well....when I buy LaCie I usually buy the refurb models...maybe those are the ones that were bad and got double checked after they came back? Also my experience with tech support ( mostly about setting up NAS and raids) has been pretty amazing...these guys talked me through everything and we're always patient....
just my personal experience....
didnt seagate buy LaCie? Or the other way around?
For portables I would only use SSDs these days...prices have come down so much and no moving parts....one thing many people don't realize is that you can put your own drives in the portable LaCie enclosures...voids the warranty of course but it is pretty easy to do....
 
Seagate makes drives, LaCie designs enclosures and buys drives from other manufacturers, they never actually made the drives. So I doubt Seagate would have bought LaCie, and pretty sure Seagate hasn't been sold, could be wrong though. Right now you really only have two choices in spinning drives, Seagate and Western Digital bought just about every major player.
 
I use the Lacie Thunderbolt rugged drives for in the field back up, but have recently found out that the Thunderbolt ones only use 5400 rpm drives in them, So I don't know if it makes sense to pay for the Thunderbolt price vs a Gtech USB 3 that has a 7800 Rpm Internal drive, Transfer speeds would be faster but I think performance might be better with the faster RPM??

Chris
 
I have one 3TB Lacie our DP wanted on a Red shoot so it's only use was for DIT to copy Red files off on to, then for me to copy into my computer system. Wroked find for that but has been dormant other than that. I also thought they were supposed to be the best for video.
 
Cryogenic Filmworks said:
I have one 3TB Lacie our DP wanted on a Red shoot so it's only use was for DIT to copy Red files off on to, then for me to copy into my computer system. Wroked find for that but has been dormant other than that. I also thought they were supposed to be the best for video.
Click to expand...

Isn't it amazing how effective marketing and rumors work? ; ). Wrap .50 worth of brightly colored (thin) molded rubber around a hard drive and people think it will survive a nuclear war.

I was on a shoot tonight and this topic actually came up and the editor said pretty much that the LaCie Rugged drives weren't to be trusted.
 
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