Help with LaCie eSata Thunderbolt Hub

I have to agree with billames here. I received my LaCie eSATA Thunderbolt Hub yesterday, and it worked fine for the six hours I used it. Transfer speeds from my OWC RAID 0 4TB drive averaged more than 200 MB/s. I shut down my computer for the night, and when I restarted this morning the hub would not recognize my OWC RAID drive. Fortunately it still worked with my Sandisk SSD in an OWC mini enclosure, but it will not communicate with any of my spinning platter external hard drives, one of which is in an enclosure identical to the one which hosts my Sandisk SSD.

I'm going to return this unit, but I'll be out shipping both ways and will get only store credit because I opened the box.

Is it possible those drivs need some particular driver fo the esata interface?

By the way, just how are you supporting esata on an imac?

I have had mixed luck with the LaCie Thunderbolt Hub and would love any thoughts or suggestions.

I'm connected to a Macbook Air 13" (current gen) running 10.7.3. I am using Apple's cable and a few eSATA devices. I would like to connect a CalDigit drive (I have 2 of them) with about 4TB of data that I need to move to another volume that I can then present to a Windows 2008 Server for Backup.

I have connected the drives, I can see them from time to time and I can copy data VERY quickly - but it is not reliable and consistant. Anyone have experience with this and can offer suggestions or advise? Thanks

Try a new eSATA cable - I found out I had a bad eSATA cable that does not communicate with the hub

There's no driver for the Lacie eSATA/Thunderbolt hub. it's plug-n'-play. First I connect my External RAID 5 array to the eSATA port of the hub and hook up the Thunderbolt cable to my 2011 iMac. My iMac boot to Finder and immediately recognized the two partitions on my RAID 5 as eSATA. Strangely initially one of the partition first appeared as "read only" but after I use disk utility and verify that parition (unmounts the partition and remounts the partition) it's recognized as "read/write" again. Previously my RAID 5 array transfer at 70-80MBs through FW800; now through the Lacie eSATA/Thunderbolt hub it transfer at 120-140 MBs. Even with multiple shutdown/reboot the RAID 5 parititoins show up CONSISTENTLY on the Finder. No problem here.

Now I decide to change my boot drive to SSD - I put a new Crucial 256GB SSD into a small 2.5" external eSATA enclosure, connect the powercord from my iMac's USB port to the 2.5" enclosue, and connect the eSATA cable from the external SSD to the Lacie eSATA/Thunderbolt Hub. Power up my iMac and boot to Finder. With disk utility the Crucial 256GB SSD gets recognized right away allowing me to format the drive. I then cloned my internal HD to the Crucial 256GB SSD and afterward I change the startup disck to the eSATA/Thunderbolt Crucial 256GB SSD. Upon reboot it only took less than 10 seconds to go from first apple on screen to log in and every program launched MUCH MUCH vaster than before. On becnmark software I am getting over 240MBs read / 200MBs write through the Lacie eSATA/Thunderbolt connection. Overall the external eSATA/Thunderbolt SSD doubles the performance of my internal hard drive.

So far the Lacie eSATA / Thunderbolt has worked reliably on my iMac and greatly improved the transfer speed of my external RAID 5 (compare to FW800) and allows me to add external SSD boot drive through eSATA

>> By the way, just how are you supporting esata on an imac?

The original poster explained that – by plugging in a Thunderbolt hub. Thunderbolt combines DisplayPort (video) and PCI-Express protocols, which means that one can design adapters for it that act in very much the same way as an internal PCI Express card on a Mac Pro.

Just googled "thunderbolt to esata". Didn't know those things existed (yet). Oh well that answers my question.

When I saw the LaCie Hub I thought, way cool. I can take my Seagate FlexDrives and juryrig the base units to power the drives while using a seperate sata to esata cable for the data. Wrong! The GoFlex includes the logic that powers up/down the drive and not seeing it over the data bus made that a no-go.

Undaunted, I got a seperate powersupply and connected it to the power input and used a sata to esata cable for data. Still nothing.

Yet again, I got two WD esata drives to connect esata to esata, nothing every was recognized.

I tried JUST this directly into my MBP 13" early 2011 AND MBA 13" 2011 late, neither ever showed a drive.

The Thunderbolt feed through from the computer to the Thunderbolt monitor works just fine. I just can't get anything registering on the esata ports......

LaCie says that they don't support sata drives but that thye may be able to mount and teh only sure compatibles are those few LaCie drives listed on the website. RMA please!

I too am having issues with my brand New LaCie ESATA to Thunderbolt HUB. It was working fine, but I moved my office to another location and now (using the same cables and equipment) I cannot get my ESATA hard drives containing the last month's video editing and sound editing work to be recognized by my iMac.. Of course it's sunday and now I am in trouble as I cannot access those drives.. The dayta is backed up but I have no other external systems that will run fast enough to edit video and the dont have firewire. I cannot understand how this could happen.. Please help... anyone..

This is a big blow to my confidence in LaCie.

Hello, I have ran into similar problem - all of a sudden the Lacie eSATA Thunderbolt would not recognize my external RAID. I changed form eSATA to Firewire 800 and then my external RAID works again so I know it's not the problem of the RAID. After hours of scratching my head and trying out various combinations of changes I finally figured out what works -

1) Ran a disk check of your boot drive first and FIX PERMISSIONS - apparently the permissions of some files involving the I/O devices got changed.

2) Reset of PRAM

1. Shut down the computer.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.

3) After doing the above steps my external RAID works again via eSATA.

Hope the above method work for you

Thanks Tzu. But I am not using RAID.. Just using two seperate ESATA drives into the HUB. Are they set up by default as a raid?

Well I just did that, and still no luck...

This is costing me money now...

By the way... According to my system report regarding THUNDERBOLT:

Vendor Name: Apple, Inc.

Device Name: iMac

UID: ********

Firmware Version: 22.1

Port:

Status: No devices connected

Link Status: 7

Port Micro Firmware Version: 2.0.7

Port:

Status: No devices connected

Link Status: 7

Port Micro Firmware Version: 2.0.7

Thats is what shows despite my second screen showing a desktop through the TB port, and the Lacie in the other port..

Eurika!!!!! I switched the THUNDERBOLT ports in the iMac and BINGO! So it would appear that the Ports had to be HARD-RESET on the MAC after resetting the PRAM.

Refreshed TB SYSTEM REPORT now shows:

Port:

Status: Connected

Link Status: 2

Port Micro Firmware Version: 2.0.7

Cable Firmware Version: 0.1.18

Port:

Status: No devices connected

Link Status: 7

Port Micro Firmware Version: 2.0.7

eSata Hub:

Vendor Name: LaCie

Device Name: eSata Hub

Vendor ID: 0x3

Device ID: 0x3

Device Revision: 0x4

UID: *******

Route String: 1

Firmware Version: 26.1

Port:

Status: Connected

Link Status: 2

Port Micro Firmware Version: 0.2.5

Cable Firmware Version: 0.1.18

Port:

Status: No devices connected

Link Status: 7

Port Micro Firmware Version: 0.2.5

Thank you all for your help and articles!

Lacie... Im happy again....

Message was edited by: James Bertino