LaCie 301256U 2 TB 2big Triple 2-Disk RAID Hard Drive | List Price: $329.99
Discount Price: $308.99
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Brand: LaCie
Binding: Electronics
Warranty: 3 years warranty
Features: - FireWire 800, FireWire 400 & Hi-Speed USB 2.0
- Heat sink metal design for natural cooling
- Hardware RAID 1 with auto-rebuild
- RAID 0 for maximum capacity and performance
- 2 removable SATA drives with locks
Wish it had worked better [Posted on 2008-10-09]
Got this in a week ago and read the manual and everything FIRST. Set the unit to raid 1 mode and used the reset button. The arrow was facing the correct mode EXACTLY.
Computer boots up and reports the unit as only 1.3TB or something like that. After a half an hour of troubleshooting I would out that the switch is not accurate. I need to put the arrow facing just before the raid 1 option. Obviously a defect.
It's now booting up into Windows and I setup of the partitions and format the drive. So far so good. I benchmark the drive and it comes up as only 65mb/sec over eSATA. Too slow, but for a reason. More on that later..
One drive is blinking and I read the manual about this and that it needs to do a rebuild. It does NOT do this when the computer is off, but only when it's on. The manual says otherwise. Here's what's extremely stupid. It took over 24 HOURS to do a rebuild. You can still access the drive, but in the meantime it limits the drives speed.
Another thing the manual left out is that when you hot-swap something, power to the device needs to be off, otherwise it does the rebuild all over again. Another 24 hours. When the rebuild is taking place, one drive only has an 8gb config partition.
This unit also uses Samsung drives. Not Hitachi, like I read in a review. Probably for the better, but I don't know.
When the rebuild is NOT taking place, HDTACH reports a speed of 95mb/sec, which is pretty decent for eSATA. This is raid 1.
I just had a bad experience with this from start to finish unfortunately. After an hour or two of getting this to work properly, I pretty much gave up with it despite it working in the end. There were so many things about this device that were not explained in the manual.
The positives of this is that the price is decent. I added up the cost of two 1TB drives and an external case and it's about the same, maybe a bit less. I think for Raid 0 only, this drive might be perfectly ok for someone.
The unit appears to be pretty solid and build well. All metal is nice. Can't say I care for that huge light on the front though.
The tech support via email from LaCie was very good. I sent an email on Friday night and got a reply on Saturday morning! Impressive.
I ended up sending this back due to all the hassle of getting it up and running. I went with two internal 1TB drives instead and used my raid card for that. It seems much better and doesn't rebuild a drive just because you disconnected one.
Again, this isn't a bad product. Just a bad experience mostly due to lack of information in the manual. This is coming from someone who has an A+ certification too. If it had this info, I would have saved myself an hour of trouble. I also hated how the switch was labeled wrong for me, wasting more of my time.
Not suggested for raid 1, but for Raid 0, it'd be perfect. I have no problem trying more LaCie products in the future.
Hot swap feature is at your own risk [Posted on 2008-10-26]
I purchased this product because it claims that you can swap out a disk and safely rebuild the RAID 1 volume from the remaining disk by adding a new disk. I wanted this feature because I wanted to put a third disk into rotation so that I had an offsite backup. When I started using the drive and trying to figure out how to trigger a RAID 1 rebuild that was truly non-destructive (effectively simulated the scenario where 1 of 2 drives fails, and you want to replace the bad drive) the instructions were oddly incomplete.
I contact Lacie technical support only to find that they explicit recommend against rebuilding RAID 1.
So much for the entire reason for using RAID.
I went with the G-Safe instead, which explicitly supports this capability. Moreover, they give clear instructions for how to use a 3rd disk in rotation for offsite backups.
This LaCie is great!!! [Posted on 2008-10-28]
I recently purchased the LaCie 2big Triple 2-Disk RAID Drive. It works great and it is fast. I imported all my videos and pics on it. Doing video and photo editing on it is great.
Sweet Mac Back up Drive [Posted on 2009-01-01]
I Have been using this Lacie 2big Triple 2-Disk Raid Hard Drive for about 3 months and had no problems what so ever, very quite and very dependable. I use this with My 24" iMac with time machine. I have another external hard drive with a bunch of AVCHD video on it and its back up to this Lacie 2big also. AVCHD takes up a lot of space when you convert it over in imovie of Final cut express. Mac's basically triple the size of the video taken to convert it over. So I needed something with a lot of space and the room to grow later. I would recommend this unit to any one.
Slow with USB, reformatting process not documented entirely in manual [Posted on 2009-01-03]
I am not a techie by any standard but did not expect such a long and complicated set up process. First, the hard disk comes formatted for Macs. The manual did not tell me how to reformat it for PCs, which I found out after searching through all the disks that came with the unit. I had to surf the Internet for information and thankfully people who had the same trouble had written about it. Formatting took almost 24 hours. Then I wanted to move files into it. Transfer is very slow using the USB connection. It's faster on my quite old Seagate drive. I don't know if I am doing everything right but I won't purchase a LaCie again.
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