Upgrade or Replace Drives in the LaCie Big Disk Extreme

So you have a drive failure in that LaCie Big Disk? Out of Warranty? Or just want to bump up the capacity?

I had a drive failure, likely due to my own issues, maybe due to quality control - but I wasn't about to hand over my data to strangers for a warranty replacement. I intended, instead, to replace the failed drive.

The LaCie Big Disk consists of an enclosure with two individual hard disks presented to the computer as one large disk via an Oxford Semiconductor OXFW912 controller. The controller supports spanning the disks, or striping the disks as individuals.

Removing the cover reveals the two disks and the controller:

The disks are using parallel ATA interfaces. I had another 250GB PATA disk lying around, so I replaced the ailing drive with it. The two disks don't match - but have the same capacity.

On initial power up, the controller presented two individual disks. This would work fine, but wasn't what I needed. I needed 500GB of contiguous storage, and didn't care to use software RAID.

The solution to this problem is to locate and download the OXFW912 firmware uploader. You can find this around various websites that sell the OXFW912 controller as part of a do-it-yourself kit. The filename for the uploader is uploadergui.jar and is available in flavors for Mac OS X (separate binaries for Intel or PowerPC,) and for Windows. The uploader permits you to reconfigure the controller operating mode.

Simply put:

Installing the drive:
1. Remove the dead drive carefully. The LaCie enclosure I have has a large pad of thermal goo under the disk motor. Be careful not to disturb the goo - you'll want it for the replacement drive. Also, do not eat the grey goo, even if you're hungry and your lips are quite parched.
2. Install the replacement drive, being certain to set the jumpers to either Master or Slave
matching the setting of the drive you're removing.

Reconfiguring the controller:
1. Launch uploadergui.jar
2. Ensure your LaCie enclosure is powered and connected to Firewire or USB, if you have more than one LaCie Big Disk enclosure attached, disconnect all but the one you intend to use.
3. Wait for the application to display your enclosure,
4. Select "Modify Configuration"
5. Select "Striping, Spanning and Splitting"
6. Disable Striping
7. Enable Spanning
8. Click "OK" to return to the previous panel,
9. Click "Upload Changes."

Once the configuration is updated, the drive should dismount and remount on the computer with the aggregate of the two drive's storage. It *may* be possible to attach two dissimilar drive sizes for spanning, but I have not tested this approach nor examined the manual (there is an Uploader PDF manual that should be available from the same download site you obtain the application from.) I don't have any loose disks around to test with, either.

After my first test with the drive, I was surprised to find that both disks were shown individually on the Mac. I figured the disk controller in the drive had detected the change and dropped the configuration. I hunted around on LaCie's website to determine whether there was a repair utility to reconfigure the drives as a spanned volume - but found none. I figured they had used an off-the-shelf controller, and looked up the part numbers of the three chips I found in the unit. Two of the chips are Texas Instruments Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 host bus adapters. The third was the Oxford Semiconductor FW800 to ATA controller, which looks really sweet from the specifications on Oxford's website.

A bit more research turned up a PDF for system integrators to use when customizing the chip, and one vendor that sold loose controller kits based on the Oxford chip. That vendor also offered the software for download along with the instruction manual. There are likely several vendors offering disk enclosures wrapped around this chipset, so a bit of hunting should turn up the utilities you need.

Summary:
It is possible to recover your investment in the LaCie Big Disk Extreme in the event that one of your disks dies and you don't wish to hand over your potentially recoverable data to others (while the likelihood that anyone would actually go through the trouble to retrieve data from a "dead" drive is small, it is a personal call on how paranoid you are with your bits.) You may even be able to upgrade that drive using cheap loose disks.

I do not recommend mounting the disk vertically if there is a strong possibility that it will be jarred while running. Any drive movement should be parallel with the disk platters to avoid heads contacting the disk surface. I tend to bump my desk often and underestimated how much this would affect the drive, but it likely contributed to the failure.

For the more patient and intrepid explorer, you can change the device manufacturer strings in the firmware, as well as enabling various performance parameters. I conservatively tested the options, but don't have much time to spend on the repair (and I've burned up far too many hours of my youth trying in vain to squeeze negligible amounts of performance from commodity hardware.) Your mileage may vary.

Note that this WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY. But if you are reading this, you don't care about warranties.

Hey... "If you can't open it, you don't own it!"

Comments

[William Ward]

Abbas,
What does FDISK report about the 250GB drive?
- Bill

[Abbas]

I had a Lacie 1TB Drive which was not working... so I opened the box and I got the 4 Maxtor 250 GB Hard Drives out. When I connected it with the Windows XP System it Shows me a a Drive with 2TB Capacity but Does not Let me Initialize or Format..
I have tried MaxBlast from Maxtor.com and Active Kill to Format and Use this Drive... then rest 3 of them. How Can use these Drives to work with my PC.

I have tried following Initialization 250 GB hardDisk Shows and 2044GB and after we Initialize.. it gives a message Couldn't not Initialize.
I have tried. FDISK, LOW level format, Maxtor Max Application, Seagate tools, Norton Disk Manager... Even tried installating XP on this Drive so XP will formate it but to no benefit.

I just Don't trust the RAID by LACIE ... Just want to reuse the drives for some of my other PCs.

[William Ward]

David, because the Big Disk stripes data across the two disks, it would require advanced Mac-foo to mount them under the operating system. In the interest of getting your data back, I would recommend you contact one of the reputable disk recovery shops, such as Kroll OnTrack. If you can't afford to, research how to use DD on the command line to read the data off the disks and onto another disk (one larger than 1TB would be wise) and then concatenate them together. This is a much more complex task that most computer users can handle, and runs the risk of destroying the disk contents if you don't specify the command line arguments properly. But it is a direction you may want to research if you absolutely need that data.

Another solution is to find a functioning LaCie Big Disk and replace the disks in it with your own.

NOTE: The power supply rails to the actual hard disks are probably not protected against your mistake, so it is likely that they could have been damaged. If so, a professional data recovery shop can actually dismantle the drive and replace the disk media in a functioning like-model drive. It is very expensive.

Bill

[William Ward]

Hey folks, it's been awhile - but recently I discovered that the power supply component (internally) of my Big Disk had died. This, and several other models of LaCie products I own have failed. The failed power supply for a 100mbit Etherdisk NAS, the disk within a second Etherdisk NAS, and my original problems with the Big Disk lead me to question the reliability of the LaCie brand. As such, I recently moved all my remaining data from the last functioning LaCie NAS device and have since moved to another brand. Good luck! Backup often!

[David Rashed]

I was plugging in my Lacie Big Disk 1T in a hurry, and i used the wrong adaptor.
I saw smoke, then nothing.

The drive is dead,
I want to retrieve the data on my Mac Pro Tower.

When I put the 2 drives in they just spin very fast and the computer wont boot.

Does anyone have any insight how I can see if the drives are still OK? I'm thinking that the Lacie Case and circuits are fried and maybe , just maybe the drives might be OK.

Thanks

David

[Al Hoover]

OK posting for others benefit! I just upgrade the following LaCie Drives.

LaCie d2 HARD DRIVE Extreme 250GB Model 300770. Original internal drive Maxtor MaxLine Plus II 250GB ATA/133 HD replaced with WD5000JB-RTL 500GB EIDE. Configured as single master. Worked and formatted.

LaCie d2 BIG DISK EXTREME 500GB Model 300794U.
Original internal drives Qty 2 - WD2500JB-00REA0 250GB ATA/100 HD replaced with Qty 2 WD5000JB-RTL 500GB EIDE. Configured one as Master with Slave and the other as Slave. Worked and formatted 931.2GB logical RAID 0 drive.

Hope this helps the next guy/gal!

[Al Hoover]

I have the following and want to upgrade the disks. LaCie d2 BIG DISK EXTREME 500GB model 300794U Triple Interface 7200RPM 16MB Cache. I'd like to put the largest disks I can safely run that won't overheat and that the controller can recognize as a single RAID 0. I don't know what drives are in the 300794U.

I also have a LaCie d2 HARD DRIVE EXTREME 250GB model 300770 Triple Interface 7200RPM 8MB Buffer. I'd like to put the largest single disk I can safely run that won't overheat and the controller will recognize. I believe it has a single IDE/ATA drive installed.

Both LaCie drives are working today in thier original drive configs.

Thank in advance!

[William Ward]

Franco,

Remove the back plate with the ports in it. The screws are hidden under labels at the top and bottom. Remove the screws and slide the cover off. It is simple once you remove the rear screws.

[Marcos Franco]

Please, show how u opened the enclousure of this lacie... my Big Disk Extreme 2tb have something sounds from inside but works perfectly . Becuse that i need to open my one .
Best Regards
Franco
From Brazil

[Tim Trautmann]

After a lengthy struggle, my old 500GB Big Disk had one of it's Maxtor drives fail. This Big Disk only has dual firewire interfaces not the USB2. I decided to re-use the enclosure with two 160GB Western Digital drives that I had lying around.
My MacBook Pro was able to see the two drives as one volume but much to my surprise the Lacie reported twice the amount of disk space. Instead of ~297GB it showed about 594GB. The volume formatted fine as an OS X extended and journaled filesystem.
When I tried to copy over about 500GB the copy process hung without any errors just as the filesystem reached the halfway mark.
I have no idea how to tell the Lacie that it only has two 160GB drives the firmware uploader software doesn't seem to want to talk to my enclosure.
I am curious if anyone else has experienced this? Any suggestions on how to fix this?

[Jackanova]

*** just for people landing here searching for a solution to this problem (as I searched myself a lot)

---------------------------

I managed to gain access to ALL data (files, music, movies, etc.) from a completely dead lacie bigdisk 500 gb case, with 2 Raid 0 250 gb disks inside.

It works ! I just finished copying 240 Gb from the "unmountable" lacie bigdisk 500 to a newly bought 500 gb usb drive.

It will work IF both hard drives are phisically ok. If one of them is phisically dead, sorry, you have lost your data.

Here is how I did it :

1. open the case [it void the warranty]
2. remove the 2 disks
3. connect them both in a PC (desktop with 2 free 3.5 IDE connectors), on IDE cable (with jumpers properly configured)
4. boot the pc [IF windows asks to initialise newly connected disks DO NOT D O IT]
5. find the following 2 softwares : http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm AND http://www.runtime.org/captain-nemo.htm
6. watch this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWNq5rAhZ9Y (or search for "raid reconstructor tutorial" on youtube. This video explained me exactly how to get it back to life, as the soft is not completely trivial.
7. open raid reconstructor
8. select both hard drives
9. "open disks"
10. analyse
11. put 5000000 in sector to analyse (instead of 100000 wich is not enough)
12. if there is a clear suggestion, select proper settings
13. back to main screen
14. create a VIM virtual image, and save it somewhere on your PC (ex : in my documents)
15. open "captain nemo"
16. click on "image", sleect the .vim file just created before
17. Voilà ! you have access to your data !

Good Luck if you are trying to get back part of your electronic life...

One important reminder : Do NEVER use Raid 0 hard drives to store/backup any data. It is ONLY useful for performance. Not for safety. Raid 1, n is of course ok.

Jack

[Ricardo]

Nope Alberto, I'm having the same exact trouble with the exact same disk, and almost at the same time. Meanwhile let me know if you can find a solution. I'll be trying stuff over here

[Alberto]

Here u go for all Firewire tools and firmwares, Justin Case

http://www.fwdepot.com/firewiredepot/firmware/firmware.html

[douglas]

Hallo,
Maybe someone can help me.

I have a lacie ethernet big disk 1,5. I'm having trouble finding the disk. The Ipconfig soft never finds the disk??
I have attached the usb, he ask for the driver to be installed, but still nothing found with the ipconfig soft. Is there an other way that I can connect?
I've tried to recover my data by plugging the sata's direct on my motherboard of my computer, but I see the drives when I boot, but not in windows??
thank you

It looks like I'm the only one having a lot of trouble with the lacie disks.

@Ralph: I don't know if you can attach the two disks to another computer and expect it to detect a the disk spanning. Testing it would require a lot of time, and the strong possibility that you will lose the data.

I am surprised it does not power on, however. When you press the power button, I assume it does not illuminate at all? I've had a LaCie power brick die - even though the LED on the power brick illuminated - the output stage was bad. The enclosure itself was fine.

I would suggest locating a compatible LaCie power supply and ensure it isn't related to the supply - a cheaper and quicker solution would be to use a multimeter to ensure that voltage is present on the output pins of your supply.

@Stephen: Thank you.

@Alex and the other Bigger Disk owners - I haven't any experience with the controller in these units, or how the firmware is manipulated. However, I assume that at a minimum you'd be able to configure it to present each disk individually. Not an optimal solution, but an option.

As for myself, the second, original, disk in my Big Disk has finally failed. I'll be cracking it open once more to see if I can put in larger disks. I think the failed drive was damaged in the same incident that caused the first head crash, but took longer to fail completely.

I don't know where to find the Oxford utilities. I found it via Google, and thanks to the vagaries of copyright, licensing, and litigious individuals, I leave it to you to do the same. :)

[Stephen]

I want to thank you for the info you have provided on this site. You gave me courage to take the drive apart and listen for which Hitachi disk was making the noises. Whipped it out, then located an exact replacement on Ebay. So $75 later, my $500 LaCie lives to spin another day. So simple - but I wouldn't have thought to even attempt it without finding your site. Thanks so much.

[ralph]

I had this disk backing up a maxtor one touch NAS. The maxtor died and I could not get either my mac or pc to read the Lacie. I had one of my tech people at school look at the lacie, and when i got it back it does not power up (the power cord led does light up green). Can you put these disks into some other enclosure (they are raid 0 so I think you might need something special), or otherwise perhaps change the power switch? Lacie will not fix without wiping out the data, and a data recovery company wants $4400 (and told me I couldnt just swap the disks to another enclosure). Any ideas on this? Thanks!

[Jose Dias]

Hello all,
Just replaced my 2 250GB disks with 2 60GB disks from maxtor. The disk is working but only connecting with firewire 400 or 800. When i try to connect the disk using USB, it's not recognized...
Can you help? Tks

[MechaNikos]

Hi,

I just took mine apart today. It's a Bigger Disk Extreme 2TB. It has 4 500GB Hitachi Deskstar drives inside which have been making all sorts of funny sounds recently and kept disappearing from the OS. I checked the drives individually on another computer and they all seem to be working fine, but I realised that 2 of the 4 disks kept powering down for no apparent reason, hence the problem of the disappearing disk. Looks like it's a voltage regulator issue, so I'll try changing that on Monday.

[Greg Barker]

Even,

Your problem may be with the cables. I've had my bigger disk die a few times, and wiggling the internal cables always fixed them. It looks like the some of the cables lacie used were poor quality. I haven't found any replacements, but I'm sure some of the online cable places will can make them, they are just short ide cables.

[Kent]

Replaced the two 250 GB drives that failed with two new 500GB drives. Showed up in my Drive Setup utility as one big 1TB drive...no need for firware updates. Partitioned into four drives and all is well! Thanks for the info.

[alex kent]

ok i did a bunch more hacking with the Lacie Bigger Disk Extreme controller (four ide pata disks attached to an oxford 912 chip).

i found;
the oxford chip will only identify all four drives if they're Identical. not just same size, but same manufacturer also.
it appears that if you use the Oxford Updater software to change the settings on the Lacie controller you can easily (and it appears irreparably) kill its ability to see four disks. after replacing the Lacie firmware with the Oxford 912 firmware the controller will only see two drives (this was proven by taking a working set of four drives from another Lacie BDE and attaching them to an updated controller card, it didn't work).

maybe this info is useful to someone

alex.

[alex kent]

even, will

i am in a similar situation, but with a 2TB Lacie enclosure. basically i had two of these four drive enclosures which both failed (!) so now i'm trying to salvage 4 good disks and rebuild one useful enclosure and re-raid it.
unfortunately i now have the same problem as will, running the Oxford uploader software to configure the controller only gives me access to 2 of the 4 disks; one of the PATA busses in the case. (i know it's two disks on one bus as i can unplug the others and it still functions). i'm trying all kinds of variations but can't get the controller to give me all the disks...
any thoughts would be appreciated.

alex.

[William Ward]

Even,
It's been awhile since I hacked away with this project, but if it sees just two disks rather than four, investigate whether the software is treating each IDE BUS as a separate component. You may need to manipulate it to respect both buses. I do not believe size matters here when doing a volume aggregate rather than a stripe.

Jim,
I had to hunt around awhile for the utility, at the time I originally found it, a third party enclosure site was selling the chipset on a PCB and offering the software for download to configure the controller. Keep looking.

I configured the controller to treat both disks as a single device. Originally they appeared as independent disks. I believe the default configuration behaves this way if you replace either of the drives.

[Jim]

So did you get it to see both drives as one or not.

Cannot find OXFW912 firmware uploader anywhare. Any tips?

Please email me if you have that info. Thanks