Possible fault with LaCie Network Space 1TB drive?

Chris L

Chris L

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I've been using a LaCie Network Space 1TB drive as one of my back ups for over a year now and just recently it seems like it may be developing a fault. There are no "unpleasant" noises just the usual sounds a drive makes when copying/moving data around. Previously it would only do this when data was being transferred, now it does it all the time. To rule out anything unknowingly accessing it via the network I have disconnected it from the router for more than a day but during that time it still sounded like it was constantly active. I powered it down overnight but when I restarted it the next morning it immediately started behaving in the same way.

I've had no luck looking for any other posts elsewhere on the 'net with the same issue so am now contemplating removing the drive from it's housing and putting it into my desktop to retrieve the 600+GB of data and then see how the disk performs in there to try and confirm it is a fault with the housing in some way.

I was wondering if this was something anyone else has come across a situation like this before?
 
could be the enclosure at fault (wouldnt surprise me, had 2 lacies go belly up on me in the space of 2 weeks before) causing unnecessary read/writes.

id suggest like youve read and take the drive out and put it in a desktop.
 
Thanks for the quick reply Neil. I'll go ahead and remove it this evening then and pop it into the desktop. Based on your experience I'll also keep an eye on the other one which looks identical apart from being USB2 instead of NAS and was bought around the same time.

Must admit I've never been impressed by the transfer speeds of my LaCie Network Space, certainly don't believe it ever came near the claimed 30Mb/s and the USB2 version was definitely quicker.
 
the lacie cases i found were a little bit of a pain to get apart, i resorted to bruit force in the end.. the data was more important than the case (idiots at work in design had bought their own hard drives rather than using backed up network servers) :D
 
Erm...well the good news is that I've extracted the drive from the casing and put it into my desktop. The bad news is that although the drive shows in device manager it doesn't show in My Computer. Did you have to format yours when you took yours out of it's casing or is there something else I can try?

All of the images on it are backed up on a second external drive but there's a lot of other data I'd like to get off there.

Sorry for all the questions :help:
 
Thanks Neil. The drive is showing in there but the option I need to select is greyed out. Here's a link to a screen print -> link
 
doesnt have a file system type labelled.. was it formatted in windows originally?

edit - thinking about it i wonder if the network space uses a different format..
 
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Could the LaCie be HFS formatted ?
 
Thanks for the advice guys. For the moment I've burnt a LiveCD of Ubuntu 10.10 and it's reading the ex-LaCie drive fine so I'm currently transferring the rest of the data.

At the moment I'm hoping to format it as NTFS once I've got all the data off it that I want to keep. What would be the advantage of formating it to HFS?
 
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HFS is just a different type of file system, normally found in Macs. NTFS is the same difference but for Windows.

if its HFS and not HFS+ then it wont be journalled if i remember rightly whereas NTFS will be.

short answer, depends what youll be using the drive on :D
 
Thanks for all the advice, I've now managed to transfer the data using Ubuntu and then formatted it using Disk Management :thumbs:
 
This thread let me to try and "fix" my Lacie Netspace.

As Chris said, removing the enclosure was difficult, but actually I worked on all 4 sides gently with a knife and this allowed me to leverage out the hard drive and controller.

Remove 2 screws which protect the connections then 4 screws which connect the drive.

I now had a SATA drive with about 900GB of data on and a Windows 7 machine ....

Plugging the hard drive into my HP was simple (well I had to remove the CD-ROM as I had no spare SATA leads lying around ... but I did not need the CD-ROM for this exercise)

Booted Windows 7.

Disk Manager could see the drive and reported all partitions as healthy, so I decided to persevere ...

First of all I tried HFSExplorer (remember to run as Administrator), which could see the partitions, but could not handle the Linux format.

I then tried Explore2FS
http://raviratlami1.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-to-explore-linux-partition-within.html
and this worked a dream. I could see my full hard drive and all of the data.

It would seem that the Lacie controllers are going to go down before the Samsung Hard Drives so decided to post this in case others are considering throwing the whole unit away.

The hard drive and data are probably good.
 
Welcome to the forums gwizzer. You can edit your profile to add your real first name to make things a bit more personal ;)

Explore2FS sounds like a good solution. The site you linked to has a amateurish look to it that makes it look a little suspicious and your post has been reported. I've no idea if there is any problem with the link but the software can be found elsewhere easily using google if anyone is worried by your link.
 
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