So you have the backup religion and you bought an external hard drive to backup all your data, all is well– right? Maybe, but what if the back up fails?
That is exactly what happened to the owner of a LaCie 500GB, 300721, USB/FW External Drive. After using the LaCie for over a year to backup important research data, the drive failed without any warning.
I tried to recover the data using Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional but I could not even read the drive. As a last ditch effort, I disassembled the external drive and found no obvious clues to the crashed drive. See the image below of the drive disassembled.
The LaCie 500gb drive consist of two Maxtor Maxline Plus II 250GB ATA/133 HDDs.
I was able to read one of the drives using a
USB 2.0 to SATA + IDE (2.5 / 3.5 / 5.25″) Cable Adapter and recover all the data on that disk. All the data on the other disk was gone, or at least unrecoverable with the tools at my disposal.
I contacted LaCie and found that the one-year warranty had expired. I tried Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) and they said they do not warranty drives that are used in LaCie drives.
Once again, hard drives can fail without warning and valuable data can be lost. Make multiple copies/backups of your important data.
