LaCie d2 Professional 14 TB External Hard Drive STHA14000800

First I want to give Amazon 0 stars rating for this product purchase experience.
The first drive arrived in a soft white envelope without any padding to protect it during shipping as if it was a clothing item purchase and not a delicate hard drive.
Upon opening the envelope, the manufacture box that contains the drive had the security seal open (probably this drive was returned back to Amazon and then shipped to me).
After contacting Amazon customer service they agreed to send me a replacement drive and I was assured that a replacement drive will be sent in a proper box packaging. To my surprise the second drive came in exact same white soft envelope as the first drive. The manufacture box inside the envelope was bent in one corner (possibly during shipping). At least this time the box was sealed.
Complete lack of care on Amazon part to the product protection during shipping.

The hard drive itself seems to be very solid in terms of build quality and is very quiet when it is not in use. (obviously there are some sounds coming through when the drive is in use as it is a spinning drive). I bought it to back up my photos so I like the capacity and the 5 year warranty on the product.
The included Toolkit software doesn’t seem to work properly for ‘hands-off’ backup but I didn’t buy the drive for this software, there are a lot of other free/paid 3rd party tools for this purpose.
Overall good drive, hopefully it will last many years.

This LaCie external drive was easy to install, has close to unlimited memory, is robust, so what’s the problem?

I won’t stay online on my MacBook Pro. Then it becomes invisible to the MacBook. And I have to reboot the MacBook Pro to see it again.

Very annoying, time wasting and I would prefer to have a permanent solution. Anyone got a solution?

I purchased 5 of these hard drives – three 8TB size and two 10TB size. These hard drives are considerably faster than my other external hard drives that run usb 3.0. I am very happy with my purchase and recommend these LaCie drives.

Upon testing each drive works perfectly as expected. My upload and download speeds are within 5 MB/s of each other which is awesome. I ran my tests using usb-c to usb-c on my MacBook Pro M1. See my screen capture showing the upload/download speeds.

All five of my hard drives were sold with as “Style: d2 Professional USB-C 3.1” . Every one I received includes a usb-c to usb-c cable and usb-c to usb 3.1 cable. The rear of the hard drive has a usb-c input.

Some reviews mentioned the loud sound from the hard drives. I noticed that all 5 are quieter than my WD and Seagate drives. This is likely because the LaCie enclosure is a very heavy metal versus the vented plastic in my older hard drives. The thicker metal blocks some sound. I can say that my two 10TB LaCie drives are slightly quieter than my 8TB LaCie drives – but both sizes I consider quiet for platter hard drives. SSD drives will be silent because they have no moving parts – so comparing these platter drives to SSD drives is unfair.

I bought these on Amazon Prime Day 2022 for a considerable discount. If I can get the discount again, I would purchase these. At full price, I would purchase these if I needed the fast transfer speeds. But if the transfer speed wasn’t important I would just buy the cheapest price-per-TB hard drive at the time from WD, Seagate or LaCie. LaCie drives do have a premium price tag and have a higher quality enclosure but use a Seagate hard drive inside.

——- ——- ——- Feb 20, 2022 Update ——- ——- ——-
The 2 drives that I installed on Sep 13, 2020 will not power on.
I swapped the power supplies with the power supply from the 3rd drive – but the drives will not power on.

Both drives spun up and can be read after removing from the chassis and plugging them into a docking station.
I ‘m fairly certain that the power switch/module failed, because swapping the power supply didn’t work.
The switch is wired to a small board that is in the top of the chassis. The wiring leads to the bottom of the chassis, where the power supply plugs in.

I was lucky with this one – both drives are part of a windows storage set and the data is still readable.

The drives are non-shingled, 7200 RPM Barracuda Pro drives – which is what I wanted.
I’m disappointed that the power switch/module failed on 2 drives and I’m waiting for the 3rd drive to fail.
Will see what Seagate (LaCie’s parent company) does – the drives are 17 months into a 60 month warranty.

I used about 1.5 TB of the 4 TB capacity. Will order a 2 TB SSD and use these as backup drives.

——- ——- ——- Sep 13, 2020 — Original Review ——- ——- ——-

My important files are backed up to multiple SSD drives. I decided that it might be easier to consolidate the backups to a larger mechanical drive, so I looked for an external mechanical drive that was durable and had decent performance.

I read the reviews for LaCie and Glyph – it was obvious that Mac Users were having problems, but there were also some problems for Windows users. The problems seemed worse for the 8 & 10 TB drives.

I ordered two 4 TB LaCie d2 Professional drives. The drives are very quiet and don’t run hot.

1. After registering one drive, the LaCie website kept looping back to a popup window about Seagate.
It was impossible to add the 2nd drive until the next day. Maybe a new user account can only register one device when the account is created?

2. I decided that using Windows utilities was easier vs. trying to use either product download. The User Guides are weak and website articles are old.

— Lacie_Desktop_Manager_for_Windows installed correctly, but it couldn’t identify any drives, including the LaCie drives.
— LaCieToolkit installed correctly – but didn’t do much other than identify both drives. You can mirror a system’s boot drive to a LaCie drive, but can’t mirror a LaCie drive to another LaCie drive. Same thing applies for Backup & Restore.

2. Both LaCie drives worked out of the box for Windows 10 Pro as standalone drives, but not as Disk Management mirrored volumes.
— The drives were already partitioned into an EFI volume and a larger unallocated volume.
— After reformatting from FAT32 to NTFS, the EFI volumes remained. Used diskpart from the CMD window to delete the EFI volumes.
— Both drives are identical capacities, but I could not add mirrors from Disk Management. The drives would not convert from Basic disk to Dynamic Disk.

2. I ended up using Windows Storage Spaces with 2 way mirrors. The 2 drives are seen as a single, 4 TB drives.

——- ——- ——- Sep 15, 2020 ——- ——- ——-
After a couple of days, I noticed other problems – I had upgraded Windows 10 Pro with the May 2020 update. It required a BIOS update, which I applied on Sep 23.
There were other driver updates (network & graphics) but none for firmware, storage or USB.

A. Sep 15 problem: The laptop reboots after sleeping for about 2 hours.
Sep 23 update: The laptop reboots stopped after a BIOS upgrade.
—- The reboots were not related to the LaCie drives which were connected to a docking station.
—- The reboots were related to external SSD drives that were connected to the USB 3.0 and USB-C ports.

B. Sep 15 problem: There’s a Windows event about a USB device that’s draining power from the system.
—- It could be the drives or the USB docking station, but it’s a strange message because the devices have
their own power supplies. But it’s possible that’s how the Windows interpreted the problem.
Sep 23 update: The May 2020 update removed all the power plans.
—- Added a new Windows power plan to handle sleep & hibernate better.
—- I allowed the laptop to hibernate after about 15 minutes of sleep time.
—- Then went into properties for the Network adapters and set them so they would not sleep.
This helps when I want the laptop to come out of hibernate.

C. Sep 15 problem: Windows Event messages about the drives having the same disk identifiers.
There’s a reference KB 2983588 about MPIO, which is not something that I would enable on a laptop.
— Windows Storage Space displays the same serial number for the drives in the storage pool.
It may be a virtual S/N because it’s not the physical drive’s serial number.
Sep 23 update: The Disk Identifier message goes back about 4 or 5 years for Windows.
—- It’s related to USB 3.0 and a newer protocol.
The older USB standards used a Bulk-Only Transport (BOT) protocol to transfer data between devices.
—- When USB 3.0 was introduced, the BOT protocol was retained but a newer USB Attached SCSI protocol
(UASP) was defined in the spec which uses the SCSI command set and allows for faster,
multi-threaded parallel transfers with command queuing.]
—- The Windows Storage Space serial number is related to the UASP issue..

——- ——- ——- Sep 16, 2020 — Added a 3rd drive for Acronis Backup ——- ——- ——-
I did not install any of the LaCie/Seagate utilities.
Used DiskPart to delete the EFI partition, then reformatted the entire drive to NTFS.
Attached to USB-C. No problems like what was observed originally.

—— September 23, 2020 Update ——–
All 3 LaCie drives are working well, without any problems.