hard driveThe following is a transcript of an email dialog with Lacie tech support. Lacie manufacturers (poor quality) external hard disk enclosures. May they be as embarrassed as possible.
Andy: Power brick (model: ACU034A-0512) fails to provide sufficient current on the 12 V supply line. Supply current is measured at 400 mA. 5 Volt rail is as expected. Further investigation reveals that the provided power brick is out of specification for this model Lacie drive. The two disks inside are each stamped with "+12V 1500mA," indicating they each need 1.5 Amps of current on their 12 Volt rail. The pair together requires 3 Amps. The power supply brick is stamped with "12V 2A, 5V 2A," indicating that its 12 Volt rail is designed to supply 2 Amps of current. Of course, a 2 Amp supply will fail if connected to a 3 Amp load for long enough. This is either a design mistake or the wrong power brick was packaged with this drive. In either case, I am requesting a replacement power brick with a current rating of 3 Amps or greater on the 12 Volt rail. Old supply brick can be returned if desired.
Lacie:
Andy,
Thank you for contacting LaCie Technical Support.
This confirms a bad power supply.
Normally I can send you one at no fee, but according to the serial information, the drive appears to be past the one-year warranty. If you have bought the drive within the last year, you could reply to the ticket with an image scan of the receipt, or fax it to my attention at 503-844-4505. If you fax the receipt, include this ticket's number on the cover letter. Once I receive that, I can send you a power supply at no charge under warranty.
Otherwise, if the drive is out of warranty, over a year since you purchased it that you know of for sure, you can purchase the appropriate power supply from us at this link:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10706
Our sales department sells power supplies with a 30-day return period, so if this does not fix your issue, it is usually possible to return the part during this period.
Andy: With respect to your warranty period, this is clearly a defect in engineering. The product you have referenced is a 3A supply instead of the 2A one I have. Either the wrong power brick was supplied in the box, in which case Lacie would be liable to replace it, or the engineering department has quietly realized their mistake and updated the product line. In that case, I believe Lacie should issue a recall of the device, as overdrawing a power supply is a fire hazard.
I would certainly prefer to have the functioning external drive, but as we repurpose old computers, I can certainly dedicate one of them to act as a file server for these disks and an upcoming 1 TB upgrade. There are a great many other choices in drive enclosures on the market.
Lacie:
Andy,
While the drive probably shipped with a smaller 34W power supply originally, that part has been discontinued. The link references our newer 57W power supply that is backwards compatible with the older drives. The fact that a slightly different power supply was included with the drive originally does not indicate that there was any problem with the original part at the time it shipped.
We see less than a 2% failure rate with our power supplies on an annual basis. If multiple power adapters are failing this is usually caused by either:
- An environmental cause that is stressing the adapters beyond their normal capacity including but not limited to: dirty power, a bad UPS or light strip, wrongly grounded power, etc.
- We have seen a failure due to a bad UPS
- An external hard drive with bad internal components that is stressing the adapters beyond their normal capacity
- A run of bad luck with the adapters
- Any combination of the previous 3 causes
- Some other factor we are not aware of
Lacie:
Andy,
Again, the 34W power supply is sufficient to run this unit. That part is simply no longer being made. The 57W supply is the replacement part that we have available for units that needed the older part.
[ticket closed]
