I used to think that LaCie made good hard drives, but the problems I've encountered makes me now avoid them.
There was the 1TB drive I bought some years ago (around the time such a big drive became first became affordable), and it turned out to be just two 500GB drives stuffed into one large case.
It didn't really work properly, and time spent with LaCie tech support resulted in them shipping me a replacement power supply.
The last drive I ever bought from LaCie was a network drive. It would power up and down all day long. Time spent with LaCie tech support resulted in a firmware update.
The hard drives in my latest computers have become so large (500GB+500GB in one, 750GB in another) that I no longer needed external drives, and the trio of LaCies sat on the shelf.
Recently, my daughter needed a solution to her MacBook's puny 160GB hard drive, which now has just 6GB free -- due to some 100GB of RAW photo files and so on. I hauled out the LaCie drives, and then puzzled over the power supplies.
For you see, the drives have no power requirement labels, as do all other electronic goods. Two have DIN connectors, but the two DIN-connector power supplies are of different amperages, one large (1.5A input) and one small (1.0A input).
Naturally, the large power supply works with both drives. The smaller one, however, works with neither:
- with the 1GB drive, nothing happens
- with the 250GB drive, the blue light flashes and the drive does not start up.
I scoured the LaCie site, product specs, product brochures, and user guides. None made reference to the power requirements; the only reference was to "power supply." So, I asked tech support, and here was their remarkable answer:
The exact specifications for the power adapters we ship with our drives have changed from time to time over the years.
As such, I cannot definitively tell you what specific power output values you will find on the adapters that shipped with these devices, even with the serial numbers for the units.
I am incredulous that a company calling itself "the premier manufacturer of high quality digital storage" has no clue as to the power requirements of its external hard drives.
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