LaCie 2big Hard Drive Array - 301253U
LaCie 2big 2TB USB 2.0 & eSATA 7200RPM 64MB RAID External Hard Drive

I bought the LaCie 3Big Dual to try to bring order out of the chaos of 10 years of digital imaging--about 400 CDs-worth! The unit seems very substantial and the overall performance is fine. A couple of complaints: nowhere does the literature on this item tell you the actual capacity under the different RAID modes: it turns out to range from 1 terabyte to 2 terabytes depending on mode. At fully safe mode (everything is mirrored to both drives), the capacity is only 1 terabyte. The 2 terabyte capacity is for a mode that stripes files across both drives--if one fails, you lose everything. The other complaint is that the drive comes configured for this "fast" mode, not for the "safe" mode, which is the main reason that almost anyone would buy a RAID in the first place. The final issue is the lousy documentation: the directions for reformatting the unit to one of the other modes are hopelessly vague unless you're a hardware jockey who does this every day. Why in the name of insanity couldn't they just have stated clearly that you MUST delete the existing partition on the drive(s) before you can reformat to a different mode? Windows dutifully tries to reformat, taking close to an hour of your time, then blandly announces that it can't complete the job. I finally tried deleting the existing partition, then reformatting, and it worked--a complete waste of time, however. The wretched instructions are typical of the junk that comes with almost everything these days. As a professional technical writer, I'm offended by this trend, but it doesn't look like we'll get any relief, as long as hardware (and, for that matter, software) companies are dominated by techno-wonks who consider language to be a blunt instrument. After all is said and done, the product is good, if you can translate the instructions into the necessary series of actions to get the job done--if you're satisfied with "fast" (and risky) mode, it works out of the box; otherwise, you do have some fiddling to do.
 
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