I’ve had a few LaCie drives in my time, and all but two have given up the ghost. The remaining two were on light-duties, but both recently refused to spin-up after a reboot.

I found that it’s not a rare problem, and after reading this article, I stuck my multimeter on the power cable and found they were both barely putting out 11V, 1V less than the specified 12V. The 5V line looked a little low too.

So anyway, I logged a support ticket with LaCie, who said as my drives are out of warranty I’d have to buy a new PSU for $20. I followed-up by reminding them that it’s a well-documented problem on the interwebs. They promptly responded with a offer of 2 free PSUs!

Bravo LaCie, but you should have offered them up straight away if you know there’s a problem with this batch of PSUs. Still, I’m happy you handled this case as well as you did - many thanks.

Still, I’ve moved on. I’m not a fan of the RAID0 stripes LaCie use in their products, I’ve lost data because of it (and spent $2k to get it back). My Drobo isn’t behaving well either. The Netgear/Infrant ReadyNAS NV is still going strong though - if I wasn’t building my own NAS I’d buy the ReadyNAS Pro.

I can’t wait until my 12TB ZFS, RAIDZ2 server is up and running…