Re: LaCie drive going down!

I'll chime in here for a quick comment.
I have a couple of LaCie D2 drives at home and I've found that they are very heat sensitive. They tend to run hot normally but in the heat of summer they get very flaky indeed. Mine will give me a lot of problems after they have been on for an hour or so. I don't have air conditioning in my house but I do have a window unit for my office. If I don't run it this time of year, the drives become very unreliable as they heat up. As a normal condition I always run a small fan blowing across the drives. It helps disipate the heat and will usually smooth out the operation of these drives. You might want to try it in your situation. Can't hurt anyway. This has been a hot summer up here in the upper midwest this year. Predicted temps here are in the 90's for the next week. Before editing I HAVE to run the AC for an hour or so to cool the drives down before even turning the system on.I don't know if this is a problem with external drives in general or with the LaCies specifically due to lack of cooling fans in the units. I just took delivery of a couple of FirmTek enclosures and will be transfering the data from the LaCies to the Firmtek raid over the weekend. Hopefully this will solve the dropped frame problems that occur when the LaCie drives overheat. We'll see if the FirmTek units do better. Hopefully the run a little cooler. We'll see.
I am firmly convinced that many times it is a heat issue with these LaCie drives. I will get dropped frame errors like crazy when the drives are hot. As soon as I get them cooled down, they run very well. It's the heat. No doubt about it. New drives are cheaper than installing whole house AC I suppose. Normally it's not that hot around here, but this year has been a hat one.
I guess it will be winter here soon enough and this won't be an issue. Winter here in Wisconsin always means at least 8 months of good editing. I don't even want to think about it. Brrrr... :)
Tom