Goodbye TB

A long time ago (2004?) I bought a LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 1 TB. At that time it was quite a huge hard drive (by size and capacity), biggest single disks were about 250 GB (given the size I supposed that the LaCie was made of 4 250 GB disks in some RAID-0 or JBOD array).

LaCie LaCie

So five years later (last week) it died. But even now, losing 1 TB of data is a bit disappointing. Hopefully there was not much important data on it (I store important data on a RAID-5 array or on a TimeMachined part of my Mac).

So, what to do with a dead disk? Dismantle it of course.

First unscrew the back panel:

LaCie LaCie

Push the content / pull the case:

LaCie LaCie

Unscrew everything else:

LaCie

So yes, there was 4 Maxtor MaXLine Plus II 250 GB hard disks inside. I already tested 2 of them, one is dead, the other one is fine. I hope only one is dead so I will be able to reuse 750 GB of the original 1 TB.

In the overall I think it's the third hard drive dying this year. Last year it was two motherboards. Why electronic hardware is so unreliable lately? (and I try to do my best to take care of it but it looks like it's not enough, hardware is still failing at some point)

I still have somewhere an old Victor computer from the 80s (I can't find it on the internet, it's not a Victor 9000) and it's still working (at least last time I plugged it in).

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  • From Devon ·
    Hello. I was just wondering if you ever put the LaCie Bigger Disk enclosure back to use with other drives. If so, how much of a hassle it was to reassemble everything? I have a few Maxline IDE HDs and have been considering picking up one of the cheaply priced Bigger Disk enclosures that are listed on eBay from time to time. I've tried putting 2 Maxline HDs in a dual bay firewire enclosure with an Oxford 911 chipset but there are always conflicts with two Maxtor drives. One Maxtor and a WD or a Seagate and all works well. It has been a vexing issue but I've just accepted it and moved on to looking into other options. So since it appears that LaCie seemingly always used Maxtor drives for their earlier enclosures, I figured maybe I'd try out one of their old enclosures. I'm pretty comfortable with working with HDs, enclosures, etc. Still, it looks like they packed those drives in pretty tightly. After having disassembled yours, do you think it would be worth it to use one these enclosures for this purpose? Thanks!
  • From Laurent ·

    Hi Devon,

    This was a long time ago (3 years ago) and I don't remember well but I think I didn't had major issues to take the Bigger Disk Extreme appart. I believe reassembling it should not be too difficult.

    I didn't try myself, since I didn't had other disks to put in it I threw the enclosure away (didn't thought that some people might be interested in it)…

    If you have drives that are supported it should work, but as you experienced, that kind of hardware is designed for a small set of supported hard drives. So I can't guarantee you that it would work but I think you should be able to mount it back together.