[redrockdes]

My 13-month-old LaCie drive will no longer mount on the desktop of any of my 3 systems. It had been making weird spinning sounds and its blue light flickered sadly for a little while before it died one month out of warranty.

It was my "archive backup" which means I have the same files on another drive and I won't have to get data recovered.

I was tempted to replace this with another LaCie drive, because I've had good luck with other units, but I read some negative reviews on the Apple Store site. I'd hate to buy another drive that is unreliable.

Does anyone here recommend a different brand? I'd like another drive that holds 500 GB or more.

Thanks in advance.

[OreoCookie]

Well, it sounds as if the drive failed, and that is technically not LaCie's fault. So if you buy from another manufacturer, you are not more/less prone to have your drive failing.

[MaxPower2k3]

The problem with those 500+GB drives is that they're actually 2 hard drives in a striped array, so that half of the data goes to each drive. this means that, if either drive fails, you lose everything, so you're basically doubling your chances of losing your data. For backups, it's much safer to get two 250GB single-disk drives and halve the risk of losing all of it. If you have to have a single 500GB volume, my only advice would be that the store I work at gets returns on LaCie drives daily, and they almost never get returns on more expensive drives like the G-Tech G-Raid and the Glyph drives, so something they do must pay off.

Also, if you wait a little while, there may be single disk, 500GB drives out soon. I know they've gotten to 400 a few months ago, so 500GB in a single disk shouldn't be too far away.

[OreoCookie]

500 gig drives are out now (at least you can get them in Germany), but they are prohibitively expensive.

[davidflas]

I have been very happy with the 250GB OWC firewire drive that I have.