Will the LaCie 4tb external hard drive w usb-c work with my Mac air retina 13” 2020

I have been using the LaCie rugged USB-C drives (the ones with the bright orange bumpers) for sometime on several Mac laptops. I typically rotate a few of them for backups using Time Machine.

Since migrating to Monterey, more than one of them have mounted, started Time Machine, backed up some content, but then, for some unknown reason, went offline. The error message saying the drive disconnected showed. Again, all were working very reliably for several years. Migrating to Monterey started this issue.

On one drive, I checked it out running fsck (and Disk Utility) on them do varying degrees over time. Still the drives went off line. (MacOS makes it REALLY REALLY hard to get at systems messages to find what is/was going on.) I even went so far as to blow one of the disks away and remake the filesystem.

Still the drive would go off line.

I'm not sure what's happening. One drive suffering this is under warrantee and I'm having that replaced. I expect to receive the new drive next week.

So, will the drive work? It does at least for a few hours for me.

More, as I learn/observe more.

aps

I have observed some more.

First, the drive dropping offline was intermittent and the duration it stayed connected was indeterminate; sometimes it would drop off after a few minutes, sometimes a few hours...

I do think there was a problem with that drive and Seagate/LaCie has replaced it (was still under warranty). But, it still bothers me that it stopped working after the switch to Monterey. However, much to my dismay, the new drive was exhibiting the same symptom - would randomly go off line. After more digging, it turns out that Monterey does not get along with all the USB-3 hubs that previous versions did.

I moved that new LaCie drive to a direct-to-Mac connection and it worked like a champ. I ran it overnight with a full encrypted backup of my system, about 1.4 TB. (I retested the older drive while directly connected and it dropped off after only a few minutes.)

With respect to USB3 cables, from other reading, it seems to be a bit more sensitive to some cables but I've not seen that (as long as you have the USB-3 cables with the USB-C connector for the MacBook). In my brief experience, the full-rate USB3 cables typically have a lightening bolt on the cable connector. Those cables that advertise with a focus on power and don't specifically address speed/throughput, seem to support USB but at a slower rate.

Anyways, for what it's worth, ...

aps

It should be just fine.

👍