LaCie POS Drive

Ok, you guys are right in that 'backup' might have been the wrong word to use here. But that technicality still isn't going to make the LaCie work. And for what I paid, it should work and be reliable. These companies need to understand that people store really important data on these drives and they need to provide some really high quality drives and case electronics for the rates they are charging. Not raging on on you guys here in any way but it's just sad and frustrating to pay so much and be stuck with a brick.

Personally, I think the hard disk will still work if I take it out of the case and connect it to the motherboard with a SATA cable. To me it seems like a power problem because the case LED wont light up at all and it seems like the thing is receiving no power at all. . Like literally nothing happens when I plug it in.

I was just hoping not to have to perform surgery on the drive. But oh well...

Update: after several emails exchanged with LaCie tech support, they suggested it might be a power supply failure and sent me a replacement adaptor which did nothing. So LaCie asked me to send the drive back to them (I would have to pay $25 for shipping) and they would send me a replacement but I would lose my data. My gut feeling was that the drive itself wasn't damaged but it was the case. And I was right, I opened the case (losing warranty ofcourse) and plugged the drive directly into the machine with a SATA cable and boom: it springs to life - data totally intact. Moral of the story: don't buy LaCie's cases which have a history of power supply failures.
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Did not try that and quite frankly didn't care to because I don't ever want to use another LaCie product ever again.

Dude, not one of your answers is in any way constructive or helping further the discussion here.
From a consumers point of view its simple: if you are a company that sells hard drives in a case and you don't even make the drive yourself, then at-least make a reliable case if you are going to charge me US$150 for it.

PS: at the time of purchase, the bare HDD (same model) cost $80 i.e: half the price of the LaCie. Now I'm pretty sure this half aluminium, half ABS plastic case with $10 worth of circuitry does not justify a $70 premium.

That's a ridiculous argument. Eventually everything fails - that's obvious. If that was an acceptable excuse, I would just buy the cheapest 2 TB drive I could get my hands on, not a LaCie 'Porsche'. In contrast, I own a 500 GB Western Digital that has performed flawlessly for 4 years now and that too after having been roughed up and tossed around across the globe unlike the LaCie. As for your first comment, my post was about getting help in recovering my existing data. I don't recall asking for a crash course in "what is a backup" or "how to make a backup". I did say in my following post that maybe "backup" was the wrong word to use but is that really the point man? - whether what I did was a backup or not? Ridic.

This is like going to the ER and and having to hear the doctor say "well, you should've been more careful, son and NOT had the accident" followed by a sermon on how not to get into accidents.

All good points.

Except: the only difference between and internal and external drive is not the drive itself but the case.

Now my case, it was electronics failure that wasn't hard drive related. The front 2 LEDS had actually melted pointing clearly to faults with the way the case circuitry manages power. These are things that shouldn't occur in a $150 drive according to me. And if they do, the company's go-to response cannot be "send it to us and we'll be happy to delete all your data for you and send you a fresh drive" I don't care about having a new drive. I need my data. If I can figure out that might not be a drive failure, they should too. It's their job. Lets say I was an average consumer who knew little about these things I would've lost all my data when it was all sitting right there.

So anyway, I looked up the "ST2000DL001" model that was found in my LaCie. It seems to be a rather average to low ranker. The least they could've done was put a 7200 RPM drive from the higher range of drives if not a 10,000 RPM. I presume there must be varying grades of hard drives within the same brand since some 2TB bare drives cost more than other 2 TB ones.

I feel actual hard drives are sturdier than we give them credit for given the high-end clinical conditions they are manufactured under and not just anybody can start manufacturing hard drives. Yes, they do fail from time to time but from what I've experienced with my internal drives over the years is that the failure rate is decreasing. I remember having frequent drive failures about 5-8 year ago across the board but since then, I've had fewer and fewer problems. I've been running the same set of 3-4 hard drives since the last 4 years. Perhaps they are getting better and better.

The only example I can think of is lets say I buy two cars: one: which is the cheapest car I can find and the second - a Porsche. Do all cars break down eventually? Yes. Can Porsche use that as an excuse if the car dies in a year? Hell-no! Can the cheap car manufacturer use the same excuse? Probably. Coz you get what you pay for. In this case, I bought and paid for a Porsche (not literally ofcourse) so I expect Porsche quality standards and Porsche quality after sales service.

Then again, this is my personal opinion.....