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Through an unhappy accident of life, I've got in possession of 3 (three) LaCie 2big drives. They are about 10 years old but haven't been used for the past eight. Despite their age, they look absolutely gorgeous and are heavy like hell with their solid aluminum cases.
The question is obviously what to do with them? Should I try to use them, although I'm not starved for disk space, try to sell them or just dump them to the local e-recycle.
Edit: Specs - each unit has 2 7200rpm 1TB drives in RAID0, RAID1, or JBOD mode. USB3, Thunderbolt and eSata interface.
Mircea
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Capacity, speed, interface?
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You are right, I added those to the initial message.
Mircea
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Find a local school or charity organisation.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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If the cases look awesome and you don't donate them (which is a good idea), another idea is gut them to keep the case and replace the drives with modern ones. Maybe like a homebrew project with a raspberry pi in it to work as the controller.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: homebrew project with a raspberry pi
Beer and pies, yum!
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keep 1, donate the other 2
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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I agree with others suggesting to replace the drives. 1TB seems like a waste, especially for spinners.
[Edit]
What the heck is up with those prices?
It's a nice looking box, but surely it's more than a fancy external RAID. What am I missing?
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LaCie was a big brand back in the day for external Mac drives. Pretty much the only popular player in town for a while, for Macs. Guess they felt the need to extort their customers.
Jeremy Falcon
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I bet is was more of following their lead, Apple charges outrageous sums for their products so if LaCie was to be seen as the brand for Mac then they needed to charge outrageous sums as well.
Or, I could be just a little too cynical.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
I’m begging you for the benefit of everyone, don’t be STUPID.
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I totally believe that.
Put an ordinary drive in a nice case that matches a Mac's look where it could pass off as an original Apple product, and you can ask for a premium.
I never bought into the religion. I do own an old Macbook Pro, but I bought it used, with the intent to learn the OS - Apple has never made a penny off of me, and I intend to keep it that way.
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Sounds like a reasonable supposition to me.
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Agreed. We've had two of the Lacie 4big enclosures, both in RAID-5 with 4 drives each. Both were ridiculously expensive.
The first was populated with Seagate 1TB drives, all of which failed in the first year we owned the thing. We repopulated it with Western Digital drives over time. It finally died during a power spike in our building.
The second contains 6TB drives and has been rock solid (it survived The Great Spike). The RAID-5 gives us about 16TB space which we use for backups on our build servers.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Quote: It's a nice looking box, but surely it's more than a fancy external RAID. What am I missing?
I just found out: it's a fancy RAID with a noisy fan! 
Mircea
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Ah! Worth a premium then. 
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No. Don't trust old storage except for things you don't mind losing. You might be able to salvage the pretty cases and swap out for some SATA SSDs internally tho.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
modified 17-Jan-24 21:09pm.
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I looked more at the disks: manufacturing date - 2011, run-time hours - 65. Ridiculous!
In the end I'll probably take your advice and Maximilien's: put some new SSDs in one of the pretty cases and donate the other two to charities.
Mircea
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manufacturing date - 2011, run-time hours - 65. Ridiculous!
I have disks (maybe not that old) that have very few runtime hours - my backup disks are only powered on while actual backups are taking place, then they get physically disconnected until the next backup.
My backup script also only replaces what's been modified since the last backup took place, so typically rather quick.
Assuming I was using backup drives from 2011, 65 hours of actual use doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
OTOH, now that I think of it, just encrypting the last drive I bought for backups (16TB) probably took nearly half that time.
But still - I'd replace those based on capacity alone, and keep using the enclosure.
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I would replace the drives with large ones, copy the data over and destroy the old drives.
I just use my drill press to drill a couple of holes down through the platters.
Our hazard waste site has a bin for electronic waste (big sign: "No Scavenging").
Have to remember to take my old batch of 5 1/4" diskettes with me next time.
>64
There is never enough time to do it right, but there is enough time to do it over.
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My apologies for not congratulating this years MVPs.
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Has the list been published?
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I thought it must have been. I always try to congratulate them but realised I had missed doing it.
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Not yet: MVPs[^]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Last year MVPs were notified on 23rd Jan.  I'm sure Chris isn't too far away from announcing.
Graeme
"I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee
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I think the DDOS has possibly delayed things
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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