Change lacie 2big quadra 500gb drives with 3tb ones

Question

I have a Licie 2big Quadra with 2 500gb disks in it. The disks are currently in mirror setup. Just went to a store to buy 2 3tb western digital caviar green disks. Brought my 2big disk with me to make sure the disks would work. The guy from the store told me the 2big disk wouldn't recognize the new drives because the drives aren't from Lacie.

Is this correct?

The price of the disks on the website were wrong so they would have sold me the disks for 150€ less than the actual price. Maybe that has something to do with the guy telling they would not work.

Techie007, but can it be that there is some kind of print plate inside with some software that makes it impossible to use other drives than the spare Lacie drives? I've switched a lot of drives, also from Lacie, but they were all single disk backup drives. No raid solutions?

Jonas

Answer 1

You'll need to consult the device's documentation to be sure.

Most storage boxes like that will accept any interface compatible drive (i.e. SATA drives if that is what it uses) with a few exceptions:

1. Large drives: you may sometimes find the BIOS in the machine does not understand drives beyond a certain size (there are sometimes updates that you can flash in to "fix" these limits). For instance I have a SATA-to-USB enclosure that wouldn't accept a 1Tb drive that worked perfectly elsewhere but has been happy with everything else (I've used it with drives of 250, 320 and 500Gb sizes), so its claim to support drives "up to 750Gb" appears genuinely mean "it won't work with bigger" rather than instead meaning "we'd not tested it with anything bigger at the time we wrote this advertising blurb".
2. Drive geometry: many devices won't accept newer drives that have 4K sectors, unless the drive pretends to have 512 byte sectors and performs translation (though most 4K-sector drives do pretend to be 512 byte sector drives and translate accordingly). Most 2Tb drives available use 4K sectors, and I think all drives larger than 2Tb do.

Lacie may have a list of drives that are officially supported by the product, and it is not unlikely that all those drives are their own, so this may be what the man at the shop was referring to. You can probably use other drives quite happily but it may invalidate any warranty or support arrangement that comes with the device.

Answer 2

No, what's he's telling you is incorrect. Lacie doesn't make their own drives, they use whatever is cheap and available from actual drive manufacturers at the time.

I've pulled both WD drives and Seagate drives out of several various Lacie boxes over the years.

My concern would lay in the enclosures ability to handle the 3TB drives, both in compatibility, and in power supply needs. But still, I would be pretty surprised if you couldn't use them (you might not be able to make 3TB partitions depending on factors like your OS, etc.).