

one of mine caught fire, the other, the firewire bridge went out. The dual drive raid units such as the bigger disk DO have fans, but also have the issues I described before. guess the newer 500gb single drive units might be better since they have fans. That bit about operating safely might be true if you don't mind your drive running at the heat of a toaster oven. The 500GB drive comes with an advanced “smart fan” that runs on the quietest setting possible to minimize noise." This feature allows the 320GB drive to operate safely and quietly without a fan. the d2 single drive units do NOT have fans (I thought perhaps that had changed in the past year or so, but I checked their website: "This drive’s design naturally dissipates internal drive heat- drawing it away from the internal drive toward the external casing, keeping it safe and prolonging its life and reliability. Sorry.should have been more specific about the individual problems of Lacie drives. Western digital drives have an issue with going to sleep as far as I know.

but that might be because I'm close to where they're manufactured and when one drive went down on a friend's job, he brought it in and they fixed it for him in 10 minutes while he waited for it. So far I've been more than happy with G-Drives (have G-raids and G-drives to replace the lacie's). a single drive you can slip into another case and still keep working, striped Lacie drives, you get 2 unusable drives unless you get the EXACT same case for them from Lacie. (look elsewhere on this and other forums for recommendations on hard drives if you don't want to take my word for it) you're REALLY stuck if you have one of these drives since 9 times out of 10 it's the drive's firewire interface or raid circuit that goes bad not the drive itself. these drives don't have fans so they run really hot, and the striped drives (big disks) have proprietary boards that tend to fail and sometimes catch fire-one of mine did. I trusted Lacie in the past, but their quality control and design now stink. I have had 10 of these things go belly up over the past 3 years. the same can be said for hard drives, which is where I will add a word of caution. I second the Crucial recommendation on ram.
