Has anyone found a good reliable drive yet? Seeing all the poor reviews for Lacie (of which I own four) makes me nervous!
1372872
No longer a La Cie fan. Western Digital is my goto brand these days, based on reviews and personal experience.
1372873
Many of LaCie's Hard Drives are actually WD inside .... LaCie just makes the enclosures and internal electronics, not the internal hard drives themselves!I have found many WD hard drives as original HD's installed in many of my Lacie HD's once opened up.
1372874
I like their design but drive went down. Looking to replace their Seagate with another manufacturer drive.
1372875
Mine went down in just over a year. Fortunately I had a backup. I suggest you back up ASAP.
809744
I have both the 256gb and the 1tb USB drives. So far I am quite impressed by the transfer speed and reliability of them. So much that I carry a great deal of information to include pictures and songs. So far neither one of them failed on me. You need to verify that the drive is a legitimate one by checking that on the USB port connector has the serial number engraved. I understand that there are some cheap ones on the market with a much lesser performance and capacity from what is described! I hope this may help!
629561
I've just had my 4th large (>1TB) WD drive failure in less than 2 years. I've had more drives fail in the last 2 years than in the last 20. All of them large WD drives. I'm done with WD. All these failures were with drives less than 3 years old. Just absolutely unacceptable.
502533
I have long been a Seagate user, in part because I live in Brazil and both their distribution and support here are excellent, reputable and well-established for many years. My home desktop PC has two Seagate HDDs and I never had any problems with them or their other Seagate predecessors. However, Seagate has been having one serious problem after another in the last couple of years, with many "bricked" HDDs due to serious firmware flaws and other issues. Not only that, it has denied the existence of such problems until the amount of complaints and outcry was too staggering for it to ignore. While those problems happened mostly with their internal HDD models and I have never had any direct experience with their *external* HDDs, I read the user reviews before buying a new external drive, and the FreeAgent Go is having lots of problems, especially messing up Windows' handling of USB ports (or the chipset's, it's not clear) and having unrecoverable write errors in Windows, for which Seagate had not yet offered a solution when I last looked. No wonder that Seagate has had billions in losses in the last quarters, even taking into account the recession, and its stock has plummeted. It has lost a lot of credibility - and sales. Since Toshiba and Samsung external HDDs had even worse complaints (many angry users with "dead" HDDs just after a few months' use), and Iomega drives seemed to be good but were way too expensive and had no service or warranty in Brazil, I went for a WD My Passport Elite (and have just bought an Essential as well). At least so far, working great with no problems at all.
179799
Well that depends on what you want to use it for.... Judging by the brands only I have used I like WD and Lacie. But again, choosing the right one will usually depend on your needs.
629559
I just had a Western Digital 2TB My Book fail miserably (miserably!!! Dead!) after two months. I've never had any other drive fail (and I've used much smaller capacity WD external drives w/out issue in the past). But i'm now a Seagate (1TB Freeagent) user because I won't trust the larger WD's any longer. Once bitten! ;) Since the failure, many of my colleagues have admitted the same type of failure from their WD's and are using Seagates with good results. If you search online, you'll see very mixed reviews with similar negative views of the Seagates, but I can only speak from my own very frustrating experience with my WD. I just had a Western Digital 2TB My Book fail miserably (miserably!!! Dead!) after two months. I've never had any other drive fail (and I've used much smaller capacity WD external drives w/out issue in the past). But i'm now a Seagate (1TB Freeagent) user because I won't trust the larger WD's any longer. Once bitten! ;) Since the failure, many of my colleagues have admitted the same type of failure from their WD's and are using Seagates with good results. If you search online, you'll see very mixed reviews with similar negative views of the Seagates, but I can only speak from my own very... » Read More I just had a Western Digital 2TB My Book fail miserably (miserably!!! Dead!) after two months. I've never had any other drive fail (and I've used much smaller capacity WD external drives w/out issue in the past). But i'm now a Seagate (1TB Freeagent) user because I won't trust the larger WD's any longer. Once bitten! ;) Since the failure, many of my colleagues have admitted the same type of failure from their WD's and are using Seagates with good results. If you search online, you'll see very mixed reviews with similar negative views of the Seagates, but I can only speak from my own very frustrating experience with my WD. « Show Less
286962
Hi William: I have so far had a good experience with the LaCie 3TB minimus (with Windows 7). It is possible I may have a review of it on Amazon. My concerns were largely issues of formatting a 3TB drive. But an official vendor's quote could be taken if you make a pdf of the Amazon page for the relevant product. I would think the same goes for any other site. And give the school a printout of the pdf. They can verify it independently as well once you have given them the pdf. If the school is bureaucratic about it get written quotes from neighbourhood computer stores. That ought to do it. Good luck!! Hi William: I have so far had a good experience with the LaCie 3TB minimus (with Windows 7). It is possible I may have a review of it on Amazon. My concerns were largely issues of formatting a 3TB drive. But an official vendor's quote could be taken if you make a pdf of the Amazon page for the relevant product. I would think the same goes for any other site. And give the school a printout of the pdf. They can verify it independently as well once you have given them the pdf. If the school is bureaucratic about it get written quotes from neighbourhood computer stores. That ought to do it.... » Read More Hi William: I have so far had a good experience with the LaCie 3TB minimus (with Windows 7). It is possible I may have a review of it on Amazon. My concerns were largely issues of formatting a 3TB drive. But an official vendor's quote could be taken if you make a pdf of the Amazon page for the relevant product. I would think the same goes for any other site. And give the school a printout of the pdf. They can verify it independently as well once you have given them the pdf. If the school is bureaucratic about it get written quotes from neighbourhood computer stores. That ought to do it. Good luck!! « Show Less
348418
Take a look at Western Digital's My Book (http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Essential-External-WDH1U10000N/dp/B000VZCEUI/ref=/ref=cm_cd_t_sims_t). I have one of those along with this Seagate FreeAgent. So far both are running strong and without error *fingers crossed*.
1511969
Hi it's a bit confusing, and hard to figure out who you are ordering from on these drives. Did not buy mine from Oceanside. Might want to look at similar drives from Fry's. They have the full warranty.
1128740
I have 3 westerns in my pc i havent had a seagate in awhile. I have a seagate external drive and its ran fan for like 7 years. So i would look up some reviews of both and see which one is best.
80669
It is realiable and I have never had a loose port issue. I own three of the LaCie Rugged Harddrives...one standard and two portable. Never have had a problem, always runs fast.
2072979
Stay away from this drive and away from LaCie. I just bought this and am having trouble with it. Waited a half hour on hold to be told they won't do anything to help without setting up a ticket and getting ALL your information....... I'm getting sick of the dating-mining and the non-existent customer service. really sorry I bought this.
351148
i am new to external hard drives. i need more space to stores video files on my imac. is there anything i need to know? will the laCie 500gb hard drive work for me. is it easy to install and use.. ty for any feedback
926434
Although I don't own this particular drive, I am here as I am looking to buy this one also to add to my two other Seagate 500gb Freeagents that I already have that have been working flawlessly for me for over 12 months now. I honestly think that your experience was most likely caused by a faulty unit. Without knowing your computer configuration (windows, mac or linux) it's hard to say if any extra steps would need to be taken to set it up, but for a windows or linux based pc it should be simply plug and play in my experience. As you see on this site, there is only one bad review of the product. If you think about how many of these must get sold every year, one bad review is pretty good as almost everybody will take the time to complain, but very few will come back to write a positive review as a working product is what most people expect. So I guess the short answer from me is yes, I would give this drive a second chance, but then again, i may be biased by my great experience. I hope that this is of some help to you..
1126407
WD says that greens will work and nothing else. I have a feeling that has to do with the lower power consumption. I have heard horror stories about green drives and WD software has said my drives have gone bad, but the drives read and write just fine. I love the raid setup and dont know why anyone else hasn't continued this setup at this price point ( I bought mine used for a little less than $100)
872725
What's really nice about the Lacie backup drive is that you get auto updates for free from the company. If it's 2, you can set the updates as a manual or auto update.
583316
Good points. It's still relatively new, and I wonder especially how the hard drive model has held up. My new one arrived DOA, and now I'm really struggling over whether to ask Amazon for a refund or an exchange. This baby may be intended to be Solid State all the way, which means the hard drive models will be unwanted period pieces in another year or two.