A few weeks ago, I noticed that my Lacie Internet Space was offline. Not a real problem, since the LaCie Internet Space will go offline every once in a while. A powercycle is usually enough to get it going again.
But to my dismay, not this time. I powercycled the LaCie Internet Space and it booted allright, the blue light came on and then ... nothing.
I dismantled the complete thing, took out the drive (Hitachi Deskstar 1TB 7200 RPM) and plugged it into my usb/sata converter and again, nothing happened.
Cue slight panic as my entire music collection was stored on this, as well as my wife's photo portfolio. Since the drive did seem to spin up, I suspected the logic board. I scoured the internet for an exact hard disk and found one. In the meantime, I had also bought a second hand LaCie Internet Space, thinking there would be a Hitachi Deskstar inside but it turned out to be a Samsung HD103SI. I discarded the second LaCie Internet Space and put all my hopes on the spare disc, which, by the way, was rather expensive due to the floods in Thailand.
I switched the logic boards, connected the Hitachi to the usb/sata converter and nothing happened. I replaced the logic boards and in a final act of lucidity decided to put the hard drive into the replacement LaCie Internet Space casing. All of a sudden, the disc sprang back to live, started rattling merrily and I could see the disc once again in my network places.
It seemed that the hard disc wasn't at fault but the original LaCie Internet Sace casing. Go figure. Why the drive wasn't recognised by the usb/sata converter is beyond me. I'm copying 1 TB of data to my other NAS right now and I'm never buying anything from LaCie again.
January 18th, 2012 at 18:20
I had a similar episode recently, my seagate goflex network drive would not spin up. Same panic set in, music photos gone, ahh! But when I plugged into a computer sata connector it showed up where upon I copied everything off. It was still under warranty so I got a replacement base from seagate, I think they were happy not to have to send out a hard drive also because of the Thailand floods. Oh well, got the new base and plugged in the drive and everything worked, turns out the new power supply outputs 1500 ma while the old one was 750 ma, it just did not have the oomph to spin up the drive anymore. Interesting that it worked in the beginning.