Lacie BigDisk and device disconnection
I have a couple of 500Gb Lacie “Big Disks” that I used to use for backup (I’m moving over to a Drobo now). These two Lacie drives had worked faultlessly for about 3 years but a few months back one started to cause me problems.
The symptoms were the drive clicking on and off or spinning up of its own accord. This would frequently cause OSX to show a “Device Disconnected” error. This was quite worrying and I decided to turn the drive off because of concerns about data loss. However, it would randomly switch itself back on. I did think it was a rogue programme on the Mac but couldn’t really see how, given that the drive was in sleep mode.
Because I’m in the position of having two of these drive I decided to try swapping over the connections and power supplies of the two, since only one was misbehaving. After a bit of mucking about I tracked the issue down to it’s most likely cause - the power supply. Certainly, the one connected to the troublesome drive was much hotter.
It’s possible to buy replacement PSU (Power Supply Units) from Lacie but they don’t make a direct replacement any longer, you have to buy a more powerful unit. Perhaps the older, less powerful unit became overloaded occasionally?
I was advised by the very helpful technical support that I needed a model number 710449K, 710200 or 710199. You can get these from Lacie direct or from several other resellers. I plumbed for a 710199 model from Jigsaw.
The model has the correct 4 pin round plug and is considerably larger than the old PSU. It still runs pretty warm but no warmer (or colder) than the old unit.
It seems to have solved the problem but I’m “soak testing” the unit today. Leaving them on for about 8 hours straight to see if I get any drops, restarts or other oddities. They’ve been on for about 5 hours now and so far, no issues. Prior to replacement, the drive would normally act up within about 30 minutes to an hour.
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September 6th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Hi Neil
Are there any ventilation slots on the PSU? May be fit an small external CPU fan to the outside of the case to increase the air flow and reduce the running temp.
Good move with the Drobo units, they are excellent, pity they are only USB2 or Firewire. There is an additional network sharing unit but it’s quite expensive.
Steve
September 10th, 2008 at 8:30 am
@ Steve Morton
Unfortunately there are no vents on the unit, it’s the standard type of sealed black ‘block’ PSU.
I’ve got the unit in an open location, as the instructions recommend. Hopefully, it will be fine.
If it lasts another 3 years I’ll be happy.
The Drobo is very good, I just like the fact that it’s fault tolerant (at least for the drives).