Review on LaCie Professional USB C External STHA10000800 by David Garnic

Backups of my important files are stored on multiple SSDs . I figured it would be easier to consolidate the backups onto a larger mechanical drive, so I looked for an external mechanical drive that was reliable and had decent performance. I read the reviews for LaCie and Glyph - it was obvious that Mac users had issues, but there were some issues for Windows users as well. The problems with 8TB and 10TB drives seemed more severe. I have ordered two 4TB LaCie d2 Professional Hard Drives. Drives are very quiet and don't overheat.1. After registering a disc, the LaCie website kept reverting to the popup about Seagate. Only the next day was it possible to add a second hard drive. Perhaps when creating an account, a new user account can only register one device? 2. I found it easier to use the Windows utilities than trying to download a product. The instruction manuals are weak and the articles on the websites are outdated. --- Lacie_Desktop_Manager_for_Windows installed correctly but could not identify any drives including LaCie drives. --- LaCieToolkit installed correctly but only identified both drives. . You can mirror a boot drive to a LaCie drive, but you cannot mirror a LaCie drive to another LaCie drive. The same applies to backup and restore.2. Both LaCie drives initially worked as offline drives in Windows 10 Pro, but not as mirrored Disk Management volumes. --- The hard drives have already been partitioned into an EFI volume and a larger unallocated volume. --- After reformatting from FAT32 to NTFS, EFI volumes remain. Diskpart used from a CMD window to remove EFI volumes. --- Both disks have the same capacity, but I could not add mirrors from disk management. Disks are not converted from a basic disk to a dynamic disk.2. I ended up using Windows Storage Spaces with two-way mirrors. 2 drives are treated as one 4TB drive.3. A few days later I noticed other problems: --- The laptop restarts after sleeping for about 2 hours. There is a Windows event about a USB device that is wiping the system. It could be drives or a USB dock, but that's an odd message since the devices are self-powered. But maybe that's how Windows interpreted the problem. --- Windows event messages about drives with the same drive ID. There is a KB 2983588 link to MPIO which I would not enable on a laptop. --- Windows Storage Space shows the same serial number for drives in a storage pool. This can be a virtual serial number as it is not the physical drive serial number. I updated Windows 10 Pro with May 2020 Update. This required a BIOS update which I applied today. There were other driver updates (network and graphics) but not for firmware, storage or USB. It's too early to tell if the issues have been resolved. I'll post an update in a few days after seeing some results. ------ Update September 23, 2020 -------- LaCie drives work fine, no issues. ---- --- ------- ------- Fixed Windows 10 issues. ------- ------- ------- 1. Notebook restart stopped after BIOS update. The reboots were not related to the LaCie drives attached to the docking station. Reboots have been associated with external SSD drives connected to USB 3.0 and USB-C.2 ports. The May 2020 update removes all power plans. A new Windows power plan has been added to better handle sleep and hibernation. I put the laptop to sleep after about 15 minutes of inactivity. Then I went into the properties of the network adapters and configured them so that they would not sleep. It helps when I want the laptop to wake up from sleep.3. The Disk ID message for Windows appeared about 4 or 5 years ago. This is due to USB 3.0 and newer protocols. [old USB standards used the Bulk-Only Transport (BOT) protocol to transfer data between devices. When USB 3.0 was introduced, the BOT protocol was retained, but a newer USB Attached SCSI protocol (UASP) was defined in the specification that uses the SCSI command set and allows faster parallel transfers with multiple threads and command queues.] Windows Storage The Space serial number is linked to the UASP issue. -------- ------- ------- Added third disk for Acronis Backup ------- ----- -- ------ - I do not have LaCie/Seagate utilities installed. Used DiskPart to remove the EFI partition and then reformatted the entire drive to NTFS. Connected to USB-C. No similar problems as initially observed.