Specialist · LaCie drives
LaCie sells the enclosure; Seagate, which owns the brand, usually supplies the mechanism inside it. That division accounts for most of what reaches us from Maidenhead: a Rugged whose orange bumper shrugged off the fall while the heads did not, a d2 whose bridge board has died in front of a perfectly healthy disk, or a 2big that has run on one member since the spring. Bench work throughout, none of it hurried.
Describe the fault to an engineer
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| The symptom | The likely cause | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A Rugged that clicks after a fall | The bumper saved the shell, but the heads inside were set down the hard way and have failed | Leave it off; each click costs more |
| A d2 that lights up and never mounts | The bridge board in the enclosure has gone, and the disk sitting behind it is untouched | Good odds; the disk is read directly |
| A 2big that has had one bay dark for months | The pair has run degraded for months, and the second member has now followed | Stop writing to it; send the box whole |
| A desktop LaCie slowing down month by month | Weak sectors on a large 3.5in mechanism, shingled ones worst | Come to us while it still reads and more of it survives |
| A password-locked unit that will not open | Hardware encryption, with the key held on the bridge, not the platters | Bring the password; keep the unit intact |
| A prompt to initialise a drive that was full | The volume structures took the damage, not the files beneath them | Decline it, then unplug the unit |
Nothing becomes chargeable until you have said yes to it. Each item takes a case number of its own the moment it arrives, an engineer establishes what has actually failed, and you are given a candid view of which files stand a realistic chance of returning. The single quote that follows is fixed, written down, and costs nothing.
A unit that beeps or clicks is not switched on again to prove the point. The enclosure comes off at the bench and the mechanism is read on a port of its own, which settles in minutes whether the board or the disk failed.
Mechanical work is done under clean air, using a donor matched for family and batch. Where the model encrypts at the bridge, that board is recovered alongside the platters, since parted from it the disk yields nothing but ciphertext.
The large 3.5in mechanisms in d2 and 2big units are often shingled, so they read in fits and starts; the image is built in passes, the weakest regions held back until the rest is safely down. Days of it, rather than hours.
Nothing is billed until you have seen the recovered file list in full and told us to go ahead. What comes back arrives on new media, with the return journey at our cost, and the case stays open at this end until you have opened every file yourself.
The limit we will not dress up: hardware encryption is real encryption. Where a model locks at the bridge and nobody has the password, the platters stay closed and no laboratory can alter that. The same holds for a 2big whose long-dead member is physically damaged: the set waits on that one disk. The file list reaches you before any fee falls due.
The amber light had been showing since the spring and nobody had looked at the back of the desk. When the second disk began clicking, the volume vanished altogether. Both members were imaged separately, the noisy one only after donor heads had been fitted in clean air, and the enclosure came in with them, which settled how the pair had been configured. Almost all of it came back, four years of job files among it.
Not necessarily, though it is the harder version of this job. If the pair was mirrored, the disk that carried on alone holds everything up to the day it stopped, and that is the one worth the mechanical work; the member that failed first holds a copy dated to whenever it dropped out, which is a fallback rather than a first choice. Both are imaged, separately, and the enclosure travels with them because the layout was recorded there. Nothing is ever written back to the originals.
Because the bumper protects the casing, not the mechanism. Inside a spinning Rugged is an ordinary 2.5in disk whose heads fly nanometres above the surface while it turns, and a knock at that moment sets them down onto the platter rather than beside it. Rubber absorbs the shock to the shell and changes nothing about the physics within. An unmarked case is not evidence of an undamaged drive, so leave it switched off and let the bench look.
The whole unit, and its power supply with it. On the models that encrypt in hardware, the key is held by the bridge board and not by the disk, so the two have to be recovered together; alone, the platters give up nothing legible. A 2big or 6big records its array layout in the enclosure too, which saves a great deal of guesswork later on. An external drive is welcome to travel in its own shell, and a bare disk arriving by itself simply tells us less.
Weak sectors rather than a dead drive, most likely, and worth acting on while that still holds. The large 3.5in mechanisms in d2 and 2big units are frequently shingled, so a disk re-reading marginal areas slows for months before it stops altogether. Every hour of ordinary use spends reads the imaging pass will want. Take it out of service and book the free diagnosis while the disk still answers.
Each further power-up asks more of a drive that has already begun to fail. Open the case first and let the free diagnosis tell you what is left.