LaCie drive going down!

Okay, I have been known to be a supporter of LaCie drives. I've probably worked with 50 different drives of all flavors and sizes, and I've seen about 3 go down for good.

Well I just so happen to have a 1.6TB Bigger Disk Extreme with an HD feature on it that is starting to act up. I started noticing that I was getting noise in my render files, then FCP kept giving me errors when I tried exporting QT movies.

I noticed that even on the finder level, sometimes clips would open in QT, sometimes they would be grey, and sometimes they'd just display an error.

The drive is only a little more than half full, and it is about a year old.

So I went out and bought some G-Raid drives, and RAIDed them together so I have about 1TB of space. And I started transferring the files. About half way through, the drive began to act up again. I get errors when trying to copy files saying that Finder cannot open the file.

Since the hiccups seem to happen after the drive is on for a while - more than an hour - I think it may be a heat issue. The "quiet fan" sounds like a jet engine, and I'll be the first to admit that my apartment doesn't have AC!

So my question is - can I remove the SATA drives and put them in another enclosure? At my office we have SATA RAID towers and extra drive trays. If I pop open the LaCie and pop the drives into the RAID will they mount? Will it help? Or is it the drives themselves that are causing the problem.

I think I have about a week left in my warranty, but to be honest, I am worried that LaCie will loose the data.

What would you do? And don't say "back-up the media" cause hind sight is always 40/40.

-Rick


P.S. If the drive does crap out completely - any one got a Panasonic AJ 1200A deck I could rent? The cheapest I know is HDstudios for $1200 a week.

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