magsafe connector strong enough to erase a hard drive?

tbird,
Drives don't erase themselves for no reason. If you are talking the Firewire bug which now seems to be happening also to some USB drives because the firmware is not up to date, I'd contact LaCie and inform them you are experiencing it.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=891457

personally, after my experience with lacie drives, I'd be more worried about the drive erasing itself for no reason rather than the magsafe affecting it. 🙂

LaCie would know how well shielded their external drives are to magnetic fields. I would contact them and ask. You could take a gauss meter and find out the strength of the field near the magsafe to find out if it is of concern once you get the spec from LaCie.

True. Though unlikely, a bad connector could be improperly shielded and letting off enough magnetic field to cause problems. A good connector should in theory be shielded enough as long as it is plugged in. The magnetic tip at the end when removed should only be risky to things very close to it. Given that one wouldn't want it to cause damage to the hard drive of the notebook itself, it is safe to assume as long as it is in good working order, plugged in there is enough shielding to shield the notebook.

"Hard drives are built so that magnets do not interfere with the data"

Not all .. depends on the application (i.e., hardware in which it's installed, and the type of HDD). I have a friend that just lost his brand new iPod's HDD data due to laying the iPod on a stereo speaker.

It was either the magnet in the speaker, or just coincidence. Apple went with the speaker theory, and it's not covered under warranty for this reason.

no I'm not talking about any kind of specific bug. just making a (lighthearted) reference to my long term experience of the poor quality of lacie drives. actually, not just my experience, but pretty much everyone I know has had one of those drives die at one time or another.

Actually LaCie drives are relatively high quality compared to the rest of the industry. Remember this is a hospital ward, and you rarely hear good things about any device on the hospital ward type forums. My only complaint about LaCie is their d2 model is hard to take apart to upgrade the internal drive mechanism and I don't like the design of their power supply. But as for being a sturdy drive, that it is.

If you have a problem with LaCie drives e-mail firewire AT lacie.com. The representative at LaCie used to post here a lot.

hmm. well, my experience of the d2s is completely the opposite to yours.. and I'm not talking about opinions from online forums. pretty much every music professional that I know has done the 'I'm never ever getting a d2 drive again' dance, after being burned by one of those things frying. myself, I've had at least 5 d2s for projects over time, 4 of which have had a major or minor failure of some sort.. ranging from click of death to the firewire 400 port coming loose inside and not working anymore, to sudden catastrophic failure never to mount again. a friend of mine who is an authorised apple solutions expert has had to send off more of those drives for servicing than any drive he's ever sold. and having looked inside one, they don't seem to me like much more than cheap to average components in a classy looking case.

anyway, glad you've had luck with them, but for me it's g-tech drives from now on.

Did you contact LaCie and let them know of the failures? It is possible that the failures were induced by power issues on your system. Use an uninterruptable power supply that is known to work with the power requirements of the stuff you have hooked up. I had to get a dedicated circuit in my house just for all my computer equipment as the power was failing everywhere!

I see what you mean.. but very unlikely in my case. I'm not talking about working in a house, all these issues have come up working in professional recording studios with proper wiring and conditioned power. and not just in the one place, in various different studios. also, it's not just me, but everyone in the music industry that I've encountered seems to have come to a similar conclusion about these drives when the topic has come up. indeed I remember quite a crisis situation when a lacie drive being used for a session with a well known recording artist died before the backup procedure at the end of the day. oh boy were lacie were contacted in that case!.. and since, that studio doesn't use those drives anymore, it's all g-tech. in fact, this is how I'd first heard of them.

Are there specific model # cases from gtech and/or drives you can recommend for someone on a budget who wants Firewire, booting, and the ability to handle 500 GB SATA internal drives that are already purchased that you have prior experience with?

a brody,

do a google search for g-technology to go to their site and see the whole range.

personally, I only have experience of using the G-SATA drives and the G-DRIVE Q 500GB, which is the latest drive I just bought to take over from my lacie d2 500GB.. the lacie is now offline as a backup/mirror of what I keep on the G-DRIVE Q.

I can't say if these drives fit in to what you'd call 'on a budget', they are a little pricier than the equivalent capacity you could get elsewhere. but, my G-DRIVE Q cost only a small amount more than what I'd paid for my lacie 500GB. I bought the lacie over a year earlier, so it's true that for this amount of money I'd have gotten a higher capacity lacie (or something else) for what I paid for the G-DRIVE Q. but that said, the price I paid was certainly fair and not what I'd call an outrageous indulgence by any means. so, while 'budget' can mean the best gigabyte to dollar ratio, I think it can also reasonably mean a respectable gigabyte to dollar ratio but with an emphasis on quality, reliability and performance.

basically it just comes down to what you're after. if you just need another drive to add to the mix, you have good backup strategies in place and you only require the usual standard of performance that you can get out of firewire, then lacie or many other drives will do. but if you've a need for something that has an edge in specs and that is better built and likely to be more reliable in the long term, then it can be worth looking at something more high-end like g-tech.

the other thing I like about the G-DRIVE Q is that it has an eSATA interface along with all the others (Q stands for quad interface). I don't use it yet.. but for what I do, this is potentially a huge advantage. I use my MBP for professional music production using logic pro. given that in audio, you can quite quickly accumulate quite a bit of extra gear to work with, which is usually all firewire, then you can run into trouble with bandwidth. realtime throughput is critical to audio work, and if you have a multichannel audio interface, an external DSP processor and then also your audio drive all connected on firewire, you can quickly run into a situation where it just won't work anywhere close to how it should. plus, the benefit of having a FW800 drive is instantly lost the minute one of your devices is FW400, and many audio devices are. so, being able to use an eSATA pc express card with the MBP and dedicating it as a high-speed connection just for my audio and streaming sample libraries is a very big plus for me, going forward.

as for a g-tech case that you can use to put in an existing drive.. I actually don't know if they cover that kind of thing in the range. take a look at the website and see, or email them.. they're pretty good with getting back to people with info requests.

Do bear in mind the magnet is in the connector socket at the computer end, not in the actual connector plug on the cord.

Hard drives are built so that magnets do not interfere with the data (unless of course its an industrial strength magnet, which Magsafe definately isnt)

True. True.

Thats strange Apple not covering that. But the iPod HD is so thin.