lacie sucks

For the past year and a half, we've encountered many large capacity (500GB+) LaCie external hard drives suffer from power supply failures at various client locations. At first we thought one or two bad units is to be expected. Then we thought maybe there were some storms or other power events in the area that may have zapped some power supplies. Then, as more of these things died, we began to think there was a bad production run on these LaCie power supplies. At this point LaCie tech support began to blame APC Battery backups. They told me that if a LaCie power supply is plugged into an APC brand UPS, the power supply would eventually die. There was no further explanation other than it would happen. This sounded suspicious to me since 1) not all the dead power supplies were plugged into APC units 2) we have many other devices - large & small - plugged into APC battery backups of various models and absolutely none of those devices have had any problems at all.

 The other day we had yet another power supply die. This time I contact APC to see if there is any possibility of any truth to the allegations made by LaCie.  Yes and no. Here is what APC said:

A BackUPS will provide stepped approximation sine wave as output when it is on battery, few electronic equipment will not with stand with this type of output as they require pure sine wave AC current as input, which may lead to the issue as you have mentioned. This can be resolved by using higher end model UPS like Smart UPS which provide sine wave as their output.

I called tech support and got further clarification on this. They said that the only kinds of devices that would complain about a stepped sine wave power input would be devices that are sensitive to the frequency of the incoming power such as medical devices or even high end video editing equipment and maybe even some super-high-end server equipment... certainly not a consumer-grade external hard drive. AND remember to take in the fact that this step sine wave only happens when it is running on battery power. AND EVEN THEN, we ARE using SmartUPS units at a couple locations that have experienced LaCie failures!! AND many of these drives have died outside of any known power events like a blackout or power surge from a storm in the area.

I threw the ball back in LaCie's court and here is what they finally said: 

The problem with APC/UPS backup systems is that they are generally designed to support much larger devices than our drives; such as entire computer systems. As a result the power variance that they consider to be "acceptable" can often still be enough to cause damage to our power supply units. In many cases, having a unit like this on the same electrical circuit as the drives can cause problems, even if the LaCie drive is not plugged directly into the APC system.

So now LaCie says that as long as there is an APC battery backup hooked up in your building and you just happen to be on the same circuit as that UPS, you're gonna have a LaCie power supply failure!!

I realize that I'm not an Electrical Engineer and we never got that deep into electrical circuits in my Physics classes in college, but this smells fishy to me. If there was something that caused THIS much trouble and had the potential of zapping an entire circuit in a building just by being plugged in, wouldn't this device have been blocked by Underwriter Laboratories before being released for sale on the market?  

Out of all the electronic devices we use or encounter on a daily basis, LaCie is the ONLY one that can't handle "normal" power variations.  HP inkjet printers hold up well. Maxtor external drives work well. Macs, PCs, speakers, stereos, routers, cable modems, LCD panels, scanners, iPod chargers, DVD players... they all hold up just fine when plugged into APC battery backups.  I will never purchase LaCie drives again and I'd recommend you don't either.

gonna get worse before it gets better

  The other day I got word that 2 of our biggest and oldest clients have started laying people off and asked to cut back on our services.  This couldn't have hit at a worse time for us. We're slowly trying to get out of the massive debt we found ourselves in and we started going to a Dave Ramsey class. For me, the Dave Ramsey class is mostly review and confirmation that I've always managed my finances wisely. Some of it is new info for me like different ways of handling the budget. It's not that I've done things wrong but I think my way works best for me alone. For a married couple, modifications have to be made.   I really hope a lot of this sinks in for Deb. 

 Because of the client layoffs and cutbacks, my hours are cut back and my paycheck is smaller.  Deb's work is getting on to all the underwriters to do something to raise revenue, but they are having a hard time doing that when the truckers and trucking companies they underwrite are going out of business. You can't get blood from a turnip!

This is all getting very scary. It's going to be harder to get out of our debt when we're faced with possible layoffs ourselves.