I never buy drives from Iomega after bad experiences with their products in the 1990s, such as the overpriced Jaz drive, the mostly-not-working Cliq drives, and the data-losing Zip drive.
I standardized on LaCie for my office's external drives, but have now experienced a string of failures:
1. The 1TB drive is painfully slow at writing data, even on the FireWire 800 connection. (Still working on solving this one.)
2. The 500GB network drive constantly seeks; in layman's terms, it sounds like it is constantly accessing data, a sound that drives me batty. LaCie today agreed to replace the unit.
3. Another drive made loud noises, as if the drive were off center and grinding against its frame. LaCie determined, however, that the power supply was faulty -- even though it still glowed its green light. I just got back the new power supply.
In all cases, the drives are covered by warranty. After extensive emails, LaCie agrees to repair them, although I have to pay to ship them the defective drives.
Despite the 3-year warranty, it is disconcerting when the most important part of a computer system (the drives that hold the data) have a 100% problem rate.
Update
The 1TB drive has three connectors: USB2, FireWire400, and FIreWire800. I had only ever connected it to computers through FireWire, because it is supposed to be faster than USB. The slow 750KB/sec transfer speed frustrated me, but I didn't really want to have to pay to mail the heavy drive back to LaCie.
Then I had a notion: I should try the USB port. I swapped cables, but when I turned the drive back on, Windows 7 went crazy on my desktop computer. The dual screens flashed, the resolution changed, the internal hard drive worked continuously. After some moments of this drama, the Blue Screen of Death appeared, and then Windows spontaneously rebooted.
This felt pretty scary as I sat there wondering what has going on. After Windows rebooted itself, however, everything was fine again.
I retested the speed of the 1TB drive, this time through the USB connection. I copyied the folder containing the 33oMB of files for the book I am currently working on. The speed averaged 33x faster, ranging between 20 and 30KB/sec -- or about 1.5GB/min. Wonderful!
The slow FireWire problem must lay with the drive, because the slow speed occurred with every computer I connected it to. It is probably the fault of the drive, also, because the drive contains the connection controller, according to the FireWire spec. (Under USB, the drive is "dumb," with the computer doing all the work.)
I standardized on LaCie for my office's external drives, but have now experienced a string of failures:
1. The 1TB drive is painfully slow at writing data, even on the FireWire 800 connection. (Still working on solving this one.)
2. The 500GB network drive constantly seeks; in layman's terms, it sounds like it is constantly accessing data, a sound that drives me batty. LaCie today agreed to replace the unit.
3. Another drive made loud noises, as if the drive were off center and grinding against its frame. LaCie determined, however, that the power supply was faulty -- even though it still glowed its green light. I just got back the new power supply.
In all cases, the drives are covered by warranty. After extensive emails, LaCie agrees to repair them, although I have to pay to ship them the defective drives.
Despite the 3-year warranty, it is disconcerting when the most important part of a computer system (the drives that hold the data) have a 100% problem rate.
Update
The 1TB drive has three connectors: USB2, FireWire400, and FIreWire800. I had only ever connected it to computers through FireWire, because it is supposed to be faster than USB. The slow 750KB/sec transfer speed frustrated me, but I didn't really want to have to pay to mail the heavy drive back to LaCie.
Then I had a notion: I should try the USB port. I swapped cables, but when I turned the drive back on, Windows 7 went crazy on my desktop computer. The dual screens flashed, the resolution changed, the internal hard drive worked continuously. After some moments of this drama, the Blue Screen of Death appeared, and then Windows spontaneously rebooted.
This felt pretty scary as I sat there wondering what has going on. After Windows rebooted itself, however, everything was fine again.
I retested the speed of the 1TB drive, this time through the USB connection. I copyied the folder containing the 33oMB of files for the book I am currently working on. The speed averaged 33x faster, ranging between 20 and 30KB/sec -- or about 1.5GB/min. Wonderful!
The slow FireWire problem must lay with the drive, because the slow speed occurred with every computer I connected it to. It is probably the fault of the drive, also, because the drive contains the connection controller, according to the FireWire spec. (Under USB, the drive is "dumb," with the computer doing all the work.)
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