Who is the control freak? Just because I say something you don't like and disagree with your statement, you think it's appropriate to check my nationality? Besides, what it is my nationality? Did you check the IP address with "whois"? What ever country it is mapped to, what does it tell you about my nationality? What tells you I'm not posting using an open proxy? Maybe you checked the User-Agent header which makes me nicely traceable, doesn't it?
I find your implied thread "I know who you are and I'm gonna tell mommy" quite disgusting. Thanks for confirming my opinion about the average "moderator" once again though.
By the way, the control freaks sit in the USA, not here. But why are you blathering about nationalities? You really do think that it tells everything - or anything - about a person, don't you? It's really sad that people think that way even nowadays. Well at least you didn't bring up my religion, my gender, my skin color or the like.
Anyway, back to LOTR, look what was written:
"La Cie deliberately give their 160 GB external drives a minimal cache so they're both unreliable, slow & noisy."
Well, the cache size is certainly mentioned in the specifications, so what ever size it is, this should be a surprise. However, the size of the cache has _zero_ to do with reliability. A small cache might make the disk slow, yes but it heavily depends on the usage pattern. With mostly linear access, it doesn't matter at all. If there's mostly random access it can make a big difference. However, caching is also something the operating system does. So unless your machine has only 32 MB RAM or the like the cache size should be a little concern except for file servers (I don't talk about P2P file sharing at DSL speed). A bigger cache and less seeking can decrease the noise but it's more a question of mounting and the disk's mechanics. Besides, the noise level is usually mentioned in the specifications too. All disk vendors have such specifications available online, often even for fairly old disks (10 years or so). If you buy something in a rush, without checking whether it fits your expectations, then you can only blame yourself. I've certainly done that myself sometimes.
Their service does not seem so evil either:
"I definitely don't have anything against la cie support, they were very, very helpful & gave me a lot of good advice"
There seems to be a problem with the disk though:
"I've had to reformat mine at least half a dozen times in the past 14 months."
What were you trying to achieve with that? I virtually never format a disk more than once unless I want to use it for something completely else (e.g., bulk data vs. system disk).
If you experience data lossage with a disk and you're sure it's not the software's or the user's fault, then return it or scrap it. But never ever keep on using it for data of any worth. Especially not for backups. Of course within 14 months a lot of anger and frustration will build up but that's really your own fault then. Maybe their service was not so "good" after all or you just have not had the guts to claim your warranty.
However this sounds very weird:
"iTunes continuously has problems reading from it & skips songs after about 10 secs"
Why would such problems depend on the application? If it's really only iTunes, than it's probably doing some weird stuff. If it's any audio player, then it's likely to be an IRQ problem (sound hardware vs. firewire controller). If this happens even when copying the file, then it's really related to firewire or the disk itself in some way but it could still be a driver bug, conflict with other hardware. All this has to be investigated and tested. There are tools for this. If you have a service contract, then it's not your problem to do this - of course you'd have to send in your machine...
Otherwise, you have to check these things yourself.
You did not say whether the 250 GB disk is also an external FireWire disk. Even if it is, the 160 GB disk might support or not support some feature which causes trouble with FireWire controller or the drivers.
"Why not give all their drives an equal amount of cache."
Because cache memory is comparatively expensive. If you want it, ask for it or buy a model with more cache.
By the way, in the linked thread I just read this claim by
LOTR:
"But ignore the advert for Maxtor. I would very definitely not recommend Maxtor. Too many reports of them giving up well before time."
I have a Seagate, a Maxtor, a Samsung and a Western Digital. Never had any trouble with them. I only remember some news article about a specific problem with a certain series of IBM disks a few years ago. But the above shows exactly what I mean. Where did you read these reports? It's really nonsense to avoid a vendor completely just because there was some trouble with a certain model or series. If you would do that, you'd have to assemble your harddisks yourself. However such bad publicity sticks. Some people still prefer Intel CPUs over the AMD models just because their were some minor incompatible models in the early 90s. Nobody avoided Intel though when they had their infamous FPU-bug (2.0+2.0=3.99).
This is one my disks (an internal one):
http://www.samsung.com/Products/Hard...SV1203N_sp.htm
You see, it's only 2 MB of cache for a 120 GB too but it's silent and as fast as expected. LaCie is not producing disks anyway, inside there's just a IDE drive by Maxtor, IBM, Samsung or whoever. In your case, I would have bought an external HDD enclosure with FireWire. Then you could decide what disk to put inside and upgrade to a larger or faster one. With your monolithic all-in-one solution, you lose. It would also be easy check in that case whether it's really the disk or rather the enclosure controller respectively a problem with FireWire.
This sounds really like a 32-bit issue:
"I forgot to mention, I can't copy more than about 2 GB or less at a time to it or else there's copy errors."
That is most-definitely a software problem or you are using FAT as filesystem. I don't know what you mean with "copy errors". If the file cannot be copied because of its size, then see above. If you mean the file was copied but corrupted that's a worse issue. Of course you certainly don't want to use FAT with file sharing, at least not download to a FAT partition. The partition will fragment like hell and get really slow, no doubt.
Then you say:
"their support is excellent"
I doubt it. If your 250 GB works fine, that's cool. I expect nothing else. However, they obviously couldn't solve the problem with your 160 GB drive. That means, if everything works as expected and the vast majority of computer hardware
does this even if sub-optimally perhaps, they're OK. But if there are issue, they seem to be unable to solve it. And *that* is what matters, what makes a good vendor. Solving problems, not selling like mad. Hell, I'd rather buy crap for a fair price.
Some other user in linked thread wrote:
" i have a seagate 160GB. can't find RPM info tho. i don't think transfer rate is fast, cause it took 20 mins to transfer my rock music in, about 4,000 songs. i have 87.7GB to spare."
That's roughly 70*1024^3/20/60 bytes/second = 62634939 bytes/second. That's anything but slow for single disk and 4000 files. So I'd be rather cautious about comments on forums and other place where people can "freely" share their opinions. Just look at the specs and compare different vendor's models. This will tell you pretty well what you get for your money. You don't even have to know too much about the technical stuff, just compare the numbers. Well sure you have to know whether a small or high number is good of course but you can find explanations for that easily on the web.
By the way, I'd rather pick a 5400 RPM drive instead of a 7200 RPM one. The latter is usually much louder and the difference in transfer speed really doesn't matter that much. If RPM mattered, we'd have disks with 100000 RPM by now but even the fastest have only about 10000. They are annoyingly loud. You only want them in servers if at all and the disks get also pretty hot. Which means a shorter life-span especially if it's not properly cooled or often spinned-down (that's why you put it into servers). For what it's worth, such server disks which spin 24/7 non-stop for weeks and months may fail after a power-down because they got so hot that the temperature difference caused by turning it off chemically destroyed the lubricant and thus the mechanic.
I assume you were talking about this:
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10383
Actually, since they don't tell what disk is inside, I'd expect it to differ from purchase to purchase. They'll simply use some disk which matches more or less the incomplete specs
available from there:
http://www.lacie.com/download/datash...sche_hd_en.pdf
Another good reason to buy disk and enclosure separately.