Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(58 customer reviews) 65 of 66 people found the following review helpful
Firmware update solves the Macintosh problem with these drives!,
November 5, 2011 Joe H (Lexington, MA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: LaCie d2 Quadra v3 Hard Disk 1 TB eSATA/FireWire800/USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive 301542U (Aluminum) (Personal Computers)
d2 Quadra V3 drives manufactured before early September, 2011 need a firmware update if they are to be used on a Mac. If you have such a drive, but don't know when it was manufactured, you can call LaCie tech support at (503) 844-4500, option 1, give them the serial number of your drive, and they'll tell you whether you need to update the firmware.
The problem is that the un-updated drives will, by default, shut down on their own after a period of inactivity, and then fail to wake up properly when the computer attempts to access them. The firmware update disables that auto shutdown feature, and instead allows Mac users to have the Mac itself (under Snow Leopard and later) control shutting down the drive with: System Preferences -> Energy Saver -> then check the box marked "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible". Drives put to sleep by the Mac will wake up properly. (If you want your drives to stay awake all the time, leave this box unchecked.)
The...Read more
27 of 32 people found the following review helpful
Terrible,
July 19, 2011 Eric Hall - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: LaCie d2 Quadra v3 Hard Disk 1 TB eSATA/FireWire800/USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive 301542U (Aluminum) (Personal Computers)
I have bought MANY (read 40+) LaCie external hard drives for backups for my clients and am generally very satisifed.However, this new iteration of the Quadra seems to have some serious interface issues. I bought two of these drives and cannot get a reliable connection over firewire 800, and I cant get them to connect at all via usb 3. I have made a dozen attempts to back up a nearly full 500 gb rugged to these with no success after a dozen attempts. Have reformatted them several times to no avail. Perhaps old fashioned usb will work.The rugged are great, the old quadra were fine and the BIg2 are good, but these have been nothing but a problem since I got them a week or so ago.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Very good backup external HD,
July 28, 2011 ecks22 - See all my reviews
This review is from: LaCie d2 Quadra v3 Hard Disk 1 TB eSATA/FireWire800/USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive 301542U (Aluminum) (Personal Computers)
I've had this for about 2 months and it's been a very good external HD. I'm using this on my Mac OS 10.6.8. I use this drive for general back up. I have another external HD for time machine while this one stores files I've picked personally. I access this machine through FW800 and it has not given me any issues.
However, issues do arise when I use recommendations made by lacie regarding tuning my power management through preferences. For those of you who have drives that do not wake up after sleep, do not set the HD to sleep whenever possible in your preferences. If you do, you'll need to manually turn off the power and restart the HD. If you try to access the data when your HD does not wake up on its own, you'll be stuck with a beach ball and you may even need a hard restart for your computer.
If you just leave the recommended setting alone your lacie will probably fall asleep in 20-30 min on its own and will wake up immediately if you try to access it the next...Read more
