Rugged portables
A 2.5-inch drive or SSD in a shock-resistant shell. Recovery is the same as any external: the shell protects against drops and does nothing about wear or electronics. From £300 +VAT.
Single drive
These are Seagate-owned, design-led products spanning simple portable drives to multi-bay Thunderbolt RAID enclosures. Which you have determines whether this is a straightforward single-drive job or an array reconstruction.
LaCie pairs ordinary Seagate and WD mechanisms with its own bridge, Thunderbolt or RAID boards. When one of those fails, the drive behind it is generally healthy and simply unreachable.
And they are genuinely different jobs.
A 2.5-inch drive or SSD in a shock-resistant shell. Recovery is the same as any external: the shell protects against drops and does nothing about wear or electronics. From £300 +VAT.
A 3.5-inch drive with an external power supply and a bridge board. The power brick and the bridge both fail more often than the disk inside.
Two, four or more disks with an onboard controller. Array work, and the OS-on-disks issue below applies. From £500 +VAT.
Add a bridge chipset that fails independently of the disks. A dead Thunderbolt interface with healthy drives inside is a common and recoverable outcome.
The mistake that turns a working situation into a recovery job, and it is not obvious.
On the multi-bay RAID models, the unit’s operating system lives in a small partition on the member disks, mirrored across them — not in the enclosure. The box holds a controller, a power supply and an interface; the software that manages the array is on the storage.
So taking every disk out at once removes the operating system along with the data, and the unit then cannot rebuild onto replacements because there is nothing running to perform a rebuild. Nothing in the interface warns against it, and it is a reasonable thing to expect to be able to do.
The related trap is that an array cannot be moved onto smaller members — there is nowhere for the existing data to go. If you are migrating to new disks, replace them one at a time and let each resync complete, or copy everything off and build the new array from scratch.
External bricks fail more often than the drives they power, and the symptom is identical to a dead drive. A substitute of the correct voltage, current and polarity costs a few pounds and is worth trying first.
Particularly on Thunderbolt models. The disk is fine and nothing can reach it — among the better outcomes, and the drives read normally once removed.
The array runs degraded until a second follows. Alerting on these is easily missed because they are desk-side units rather than managed infrastructure.
Mechanical or firmware, handled as any Seagate-family drive would be — LaCie units typically contain Seagate mechanisms.
For single-drive models, send the complete unit including the power supply where there is one — it helps establish whether the fault is the brick, the bridge or the disk, and costs nothing to include.
For multi-bay RAID units, either the whole enclosure or the disks labelled by bay. Bay order matters for reassembly; it can be derived from the data, and knowing it saves real time. Photograph the front of the unit before removing anything.
And send any disk the unit has ejected. A member marked failed frequently still holds most of its data, and it is often the difference between a partial and a complete recovery. LaCie work in Manchester is from £300 +VAT for single drives and from £500 +VAT for arrays, after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
On a desktop unit, the power supply — external bricks fail more often than the drives they power and the symptom is identical. Then the cable and a different port. Those cost nothing and resolve a fair share.
Not all at once. On multi-bay models the operating system lives in a partition on the member disks, mirrored across them — remove them all and the unit has nothing to boot from and cannot rebuild onto replacements.
Almost certainly not. The bridge chipset fails independently of the disks, so a dead interface with healthy drives inside is common and entirely recoverable — the drives read normally once removed.
LaCie is Seagate-owned and the units typically contain Seagate mechanisms, so drive-level faults are handled as any Seagate would be. What differs is the enclosure, the bridge and, on RAID models, the array layer.
No — there is nowhere for the existing data to go. Copy everything off, build the new array, then copy it back. Migrating to larger disks should be done one at a time, letting each resync complete.
From £300 plus VAT for single-drive units and from £500 plus VAT for multi-bay RAID enclosures, after a free 48-hour diagnostic. Send the power supply with desktop units.