LaCie Data Recovery

A Seagate or a Toshiba in an aluminium coat

The single most useful thing to know about the brand is that LaCie does not manufacture mechanisms. LaCie has belonged to Seagate for years, and inside almost every enclosure is an ordinary Seagate or Toshiba drive of a model you could look up. The design, the aluminium and the rubber are the product; the storage is standard. That is good news for recovery, because it means a failed LaCie is treated exactly like any other drive of the same model, with the same donor stock and the same tooling behind it.

It also sets up the question the diagnostic exists to answer. When a LaCie stops working, the fault is either in the packaging or in the drive. The packaging — bridge board, USB socket, mains circuitry on a desktop model — fails often, and when it does the disc behind it is untouched and the work stays logical. The drive itself — heads, motor, firmware, sectors going soft across the platters — needs filtered air, donor parts and the hours those take. Telling one from the other is most of what the free diagnostic does, and it does it before any figure is committed to.

The beep is a motor, and no cable will change it

A LaCie that beeps is running a retry loop loudly enough for you to hear it. Power arrives and the spindle is told to turn; the platters do not move, so the drive gives up and starts the attempt again a second later. Each cycle is one beep. Only two faults produce that pattern with any regularity: bearings that have gummed up, which is what becomes of a drive parked in a drawer for a year or knocked hard against something, and a head stack that has settled onto the platter surface and stuck there, which is what a running portable does to itself when it is dropped.

Since neither fault is electrical, the whole list of things people try at home is beside the point — another lead, a different port, a powered hub, a heavier adaptor. Nothing on that list can turn a seized spindle or lift a bonded head, and every further retry asks a jammed mechanism to strain against itself. The remedy is mechanical and it happens under filtered air: the lid comes off, the heads are drawn clear on a comb cut for that family of drives, and either the original mechanism is freed or the platters move into a donor body that turns properly. Once it holds still the drive is copied sector by sector, so your files are read out of an image rather than off the patient.

Dead silence is a different complaint and should not be lumped in with it. A mains-powered d2 or 2big with no light, no noise and no beep has most often lost its power supply or its bridge board, and the contents of the disc inside are entirely intact.

The limitation nobody in this trade likes to print

On the older units the shell comes off and reveals a plain SATA disc, which is why so much internet advice says to do exactly that. On several of the newer LaCie and Seagate portables the USB bridge is built onto the drive's own circuit board, so there is no SATA connector to reach — the interface is the drive. When that board fails, a donor board on its own is often not enough either, because the bridge holds the mapping that makes the media readable and, on some models, an encryption key tied to that specific unit. Those jobs are still recoverable at the bench, and they are firmly bench work rather than a job for a caddy from a high-street shop. Any page telling you to open a modern portable and plug the disc into your computer has not looked at one recently.

Which range you have, and what it usually means

The d2 is the tall single-disc mains unit that sits behind a monitor for six years saying nothing and then simply stops; more often than not the enclosure or its power supply has gone rather than the disc. The 2big takes two discs and shipped configurable, so the first question about one is always how it was set up. As a stripe, a single dead member silences the volume. As a mirror, the surviving disc sets the ceiling on what can be recovered. Either way both travel here, and a 2big is priced as an array from £500 + VAT.

The Rugged is the orange-shelled portable that lives in a camera bag, and it accounts for more physical damage than every other range put together, because the bumper protects the case rather than the mechanism suspended inside it. Rugged SSD models have nothing moving in them and fail the way solid state fails: no warning, no noise, all of it at once. The Porsche Design drives are the plain aluminium desktop and mobile units, and they are the likeliest to arrive as a dead bridge with a healthy Seagate sitting behind it. The older Blade and slim mobile drives are thin shells wrapped around ordinary 2.5-inch discs, and they click for the same unremarkable reasons any 2.5-inch disc clicks.

LaCie recovery for Bracknell, Berkshire and London

Photographers, video editors, architects and families with one shelf of scanned history make up most of the LaCie work here, and it reaches the bench as drives posted in from studios and agencies across the Thames Valley, from Windsor, Henley and Ascot, and by courier from the districts listed on the London page. Take the power off, pack the drive on its own in bubble wrap and leave the cable and the brick at home, then send it tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. The free diagnostic closes 2 working days after it is booked in and one written figure goes back to you; a finished single-drive recovery runs 2 to 4 working days from your approval. Wider background sits on external drive recovery and hard drive recovery, the figures are under data recovery cost, and the county service is on data recovery Berkshire.