How to open LaCie d2 drive enclosure?

Hi, dantheman. You were told right, but there's a catch. A drive manufacturer often gives a longer warranty on a drive purchased "bare" than you'll get on the same drive if it's first sold to, and then packaged by, another equipment maker as part of some other device — like a LaCie external drive. But the drive manufacturer rarely, if ever, warrants the mechanism at all after it's been sold to another equipment maker. As soon as the drive is sold to LaCie, the drive maker's responsibility is to LaCie, not to you. If the maker warrants it to LaCie, that's between the two companies and none of your business. Only LaCie warrants it to you; that's why their warranty is the only one in the box when you get it. There is no other end user warranty.

This is the best of two good reasons for building your own external drives, i.e. buying the drive and the enclosure separately and assembling them yourself. It's a five-minute assembly job, and it typically gets you one to three more years of warranty on the drive inside the box than you'd have on a preassembled external drive. In most cases it also saves you money right up front — that's the other good reason to do it yourself.