LaCie, which is Seagate-owned, produces a number of products which range from the simplest portable data storage device to multi-bay Thunderbolt RAID enclosures. What type of product you purchased will determine if this is a basic recovery of a single drive or if we need to reconstruct the entire RAID array.
When LaCie produces their products they use standard Seagate & WD drives but add in a unique LaCie bridge board or RAID board. This is where the problem begins: when one of these components fails, in many cases the hard drive itself is perfectly good but simply can't be accessed due to either damage to the bridge board/RAID board or failure of a component that allows access to your data.
All three types of enclosures are genuinely different jobs.
This includes small, portable 2.5-inch hard drives or SSDs that come in a protective housing that offers protection against shock/drops. However, just like all other types of external housings this housing will protect the internal mechanism from shock/drop impact but it will do absolutely nothing about protecting against physical wear and tear or electrical failures. Recovery for this type of enclosure is from £300 +VAT.
A single 3.5-inch unit using an external power source and a bridge card. Power bricks & bridge cards have a higher failure rate than the internal drive.
Two, four or more hard drives with on-board controllers. All array related issues apply as well as the OS-on-disks issue below. From £500 +VAT.
Add a bridge chip set that can fail independently of your disks. Dead Thunderbolt interfaces with good disks are common but are recoverable.
The mistake you make turning a good situation into a recovery job. This will be hard for people to see coming.
Multi-bay RAID models have an operating system residing within a small partition located on the member disks that has been mirrored across all of them. It does not reside in the external enclosure. The enclosure will contain a controller, a power supply and an interface and the operating system managing your array resides on your disks.
It would seem reasonable to assume you could simply pull all disks out of a RAID configuration and move to new ones. However, since there is no longer an operating system to manage rebuilding, it is impossible to rebuild the data back onto the new disks. Nothing in the user interface indicates anything other than simply pulling all disks and replacing them again, which is not possible. You should never remove all disks from a RAID array at the same time.
A related problem is that you cannot downsize an array by adding smaller capacity disks. There is nowhere for the existing data to go. When moving to a new set of disks, replace the disks one at a time and allow each disk to fully resynchronise before continuing. Or better yet, completely transfer all data off the original disks and create your new array from scratch.
Desktop enclosures tend to lose their power supplies much more frequently than their connected hard drives. Unfortunately the symptoms look exactly like when a hard drive dies. Simply purchasing a suitable replacement power supply (correct voltage rating, current output and polarity), which costs a few pounds, is worth trying first.
Particularly on Thunderbolt models. The disk is good; nothing will get to it — among the better outcomes, and the drives read normally when pulled out.
These arrays run in a degraded state until a second one fails. Alerts on these are easily missed since these are desktop units, not part of managed IT.
Either mechanical or firmware issues; handled like any other Seagate family drive — LaCie units typically contain Seagate mechanisms.
When sending a single drive model, send the entire unit with the power supply included if it has one — it makes sense to find out if the failure is at the power brick level, the bridge level, or the disk level, and it costs nothing to include.
When you have a RAID enclosure with multiple bays, send either the whole enclosure or the disks, labelled by bay. It is very important to know the bay order so that you can properly reinstall the disks; it can be derived from the data, and knowing it saves real time. When possible take a photo of the face of the unit before taking it apart.
Also, if the RAID array ejects one of its own disks, we would like you to send us that disk as well. Many times even though a disk fails, it will still hold most of its original data. Knowing this could mean the difference between being able to recover part of your data versus being able to fully recover all of your data. Our data recovery lab in Manchester charges from £300 +VAT for single drive recoveries and from £500 +VAT for array recoveries. There are no costs for our initial 48-hour diagnostic.
If a desktop unit's power supply unit (PSU) fails, it may look like the drive inside has failed. This is because many PSUs (bricks) fail more frequently than the drives themselves. In these cases, try switching the connection from one port to another on your computer. If you cannot connect your unit to your computer, you should also check the condition and/or swap out the cable. These items do not cost any money but can solve a significant portion of problems.
Not all at once. In the case of multi-bay systems, the operating system resides in a partition on each of the individual member hard drives. That partition is mirrored, so each member holds an exact copy of it. When all member disks are removed, the unit has nothing to boot from and cannot rebuild onto replacements.
Almost certainly not. The bridge chipset dies by itself regardless of whether the disks in the unit are working or not. So you'll see a dead interface that has perfectly good disk drives inside. And the disks will work just fine when they're pulled out.
LaCie is Seagate-owned, and most LaCie units are equipped with a Seagate mechanism. Therefore, if the drive in your LaCie unit fails — like a Seagate would fail — we treat it exactly the same way we do all other failed Seagates. Where things differ is in the enclosure itself, the bridge and on RAID models, the array level.
No — There's no place for your current data to move into. Move all data off the unit, build the new array and then put all the old data back onto it. When upgrading to larger disks, you need to upgrade them one at a time, allowing each of those to fully sync before moving on.
They start from £300 +VAT for single-disk units, and from £500 +VAT for multi-bay RAID enclosures, after a free 48-hour diagnostic. Please send us the power supply when sending in desktop units.