RAID Slice Failed on my 2tb Lacie Little Big Drive

I have the EXACT same issue. Were you able to resolve this without completely rebuilding/reformating?

Thanks,

Eric

Your LaCie Little Big Drive contains two 1 TB hard drives configured as a Raid 0 striped volume. I believe Raid 0 is the “as shipped” setup. It improves disk performance by splitting the data stream such that each drive only has to process half of the data.

The downside of a Raid 0 setup is that all data will be lost if either of the drives fail. Unfortunately, that appears to be your situation as the Disk Utility screen shot shows that hard drive disk 1s2 has failed. You haven’t found any obvious problems in the troubleshooting you’ve done, so your best bet would probably be to contact LaCie and ask for their help before attempting to reformat the drive. As you know, reformatting will eliminate any possibilty of recovering your important project.

I use a similar LaCie Thunderbolt drive configured as Raid 0 on my iMac. FCPX performance, especially playback, is far superior to my USB 2.0 external drives and somewhat better than my FW800 drive. I copy clips I’m using to the LaCie drive and keep the originals on a separate external drive. I believe this is now referred to as a “managed” library in FCPX 10.1 which, in my opinion, greatly simplifies backup and protection of one’s work.

Good luck and please let us know if you are able to find a solution.

I recommend never using RAID 0, always use RAID 1. With Thunderbolt and USB 3, you'll never notice the speed diffference. USB 2 is way too slow for video editing, never use it. FW800 holds up for small projects with very little compositing.

Yep, looks like you have a dead drive. Next time, configure it to RAID 1 and play it safer. Better yet, have a backup drive, on top of RAID 1 (or RAID 5 for arrays of 4+ drives).

The same thing just happened to me. I was also using FCP 10.8 and a LaCie Little Big Drive Thunderbolt 1 TB.

You're not gonna believe this. I got a replacement Little Big Disk from LaCie because the first one failed while it was under warranty. Three days after the replacement arrived, the replacement failed in exactly the same way!

ToddBradley, I DO believe it - mine did the exact same thing (yes, LaCie had replaced one LBD and my replacement has now failed!)! I always power down my MBP and then unplug all cables to take with me, but I still got errors telling me that the LBD had not been disconnected properly. I am wondering if this is the cause of the failure.

I have the same problem... MacBook Pro Retina ('13) and Little Big Disk Thunderbolt with two SSDs in RAID 0. I did not disconnect cable and got a weird messages saying something about improper eject.

When I turn off "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" in Energy Saver, I don't get these messages. The downside is that attached spinning hard drives are always making noise.

I didn't find a solution to recover the failed RAID slice and had to reformat.

I learned so much since my last post on this. I was able to recover my data using a tool called R-Studio. It wasn't a hardware failure (contrary to LaCie's tech support analysis), it was just software corruption. As you discovered, after I reformatted the array on the replacement unit, it worked again.

Hi Todd, I've got the same problem, which of the R-Studio tools did you use and how did you do it? Can I recover my data to that drive or do I need to get another one for the recovery?

Thanks in advance.

MC.

Set energy saver to never let your drives go to sleep.

Run Disk Utility once a week to repair all drives.

Run Disk Warrior once a month to repair all drives.

The product I used is R-Studio for Macintosh: http://www.r-tt.com/data_recovery_macintosh/

I did it by following the instructions here: http://www.r-tt.com/Articles/MacOSX_SoftRAID0_Parameters

Yes, you need another drive to restore the files onto. It would be a bad idea for the software to modify the source drive as part of the recovery process, because of the possibility of making things worse.

Well, believe it or not, a THIRD LaCie LBD has failed in exactly the same way. This is extremely frustrating. I am using this as a backup drive, so I haven't really lost any data, but I really have to send this back AGAIN??

I don't think it's a defective LBD. I think there's some design thing with the LBD that messes up when certain MacBooks sleep it (either spin down drive or computer sleeps).

I used the LBD with a 2012 MBP 15" Retina and no issues. I switched to 2013 model with all other peripherals unchanged, and now I have this problem. I work around it by having it set to never sleep. The biggest negative here now are the connected spinning drives are always making noise.

Based on my experiences, I think Arpamac is 100% correct.

I don't think that sending it back for warranty "service" is going to do any good. It's not a hardware fault, but a corrupted disk due to some firmware or software flaw. You should just reformat the array, put your data back on, and change your settings to never let it sleep.

I will give that a shot. Thanks for your input.