After purchasing several Lacie 2Big drives and installing them at client sites, we were disappointed to find that although they had advertised support for the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) it did not actually work.
The simple act of trying to read and write to the drive at the same time, for example copying a file from one share to another, forces the AFP server to fail, and in most cases writes corrupt .DS_Store, .AppleDB, .AppleDesktop and .AppleDouble files, causing the file server to be inoperable even after a reboot.
Once these files / directories have corrupt contents – the only way to salvage the drive is to disable the AFP server, FTP in to the drive and remove them completely from all affected shares. I have found that just removing them from the root does not always resolve the problem, and they any affected sub directories will also need to have them removed.
For the most part, the removal of these files is fine, and will not affect your operation. However, if you are using file forks – all this information will be lost and you may be left with an unserviceable collection of files.
Given a little forum hunting, it is very disappointing to find that this seems to have been a problem with Lacie Network Drives for quite a time.
After providing a great amount of information to Lacie – their support response has been
R&D have been able to replicate the problem and are currently working on a fix for this, in the meantime the suggested work around is to use the SMB protocol. At this stage I do not have an ETA for the release…
Whilst it is fine to suggest the use of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol (also sometimes referred to as SAMBA) in our case (and I am sure many others) this is not appropriate. The availability of a working AFP server was the primary reason for the selection of this product. If our clients had of just wanted a generic SMB share, we could have chosen any one of significantly cheaper Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.
At this point I have only been able to confirm this fault on the 1TB and 2TB 2Big Network devices, but I am very keen to hear from you if you have any other NAS device that advertises AFP support, but fails to deliver.
I have asked Lacie to have this issue resolved within five working days, and after that time will hand my findings over to the Office of Fair Trade in Queensland and New South Wales given that Lacie are misrepresenting the capabilities of their devices.
Wow, just ran into that problem on my 2Big 1T Network *and* 1T Ethernet disk mini today. FTP workaround worked like a charm. It sucks, but at least I was able to recover the data. Thanks so much for the tip.
It has now been over a month, and Lacie have still made no effort whatsoever to resolve the issue.
They have also not advised their resellers and partners that there is a serious bug with the product, nor have that adjusted their online marketing for it.
The are still misrepresenting their support for AFP, and that is going to be the crux of my complaint with the Office of Fair Trade.
My Lacie 2Big hard drive died on me after being used on a mixed mac and pc network. It was 10 months old. Lacie told me if I returned it to them they could guarantee the data would be safe, so advised me to send it to a professional data recovery place. I did this and Lacie told me I’d violated my warrenty terms by doing this. I’m planning on taking them to small claims. Any advice would be appreciated.
given the stance that Lacie has taken with us (we have several of their drives on client sites that we have constant problems with) I would suggest that legal action is the only sort of response that Lacie will understand. Small claims (and much of the legal system) is all about what a “reasonable person” would expect or do. Now, IANYL, but – for the relatively small cost of going through the small claims process, I think you stand a good chance of recovering the costs associated with the drive and data recovery.
I would take with you supporting evidence that these drive issues are known not just to the wider internet community but Lacie themselves, and they have chosen to take NO action whatsoever, and what’s worse – they are knowingly continuing to sell their product with known defects.
They will potentially argue that it’s a relatively small percentage of their overall hardware that experiences the problem. But, given how easy it is to reproduce these critical faults which essentially write off the drives – I am sure there are many people out there who are experiencing the same problem.