Replacing the Hard Drive in a LaCie d2
I have a couple of external firewire hard drives, including two LaCie d2 drives, one of which is a 160GB. Recently however, it started acting up: while being accessed it would click as though it had been powered down and not respond. The only way to recover from this was to cycle the power. It was not time related nor was it related to a particular part of the disk.
Realising that the drive was on its way out, I managed to move everything off the drive onto another before it died completely.
Then, rather than throwing it out, I opened up the case and found that the drive itself was a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (ATA) i.e. a standard PATA IDE 3.5″ Hard Drive. I did a bit of googling an decided to replace it with a 320GB drive. I bought a 320GB Western Digital WD3200AAKB Caviar SE16, 7200rpm, 16MB cache, 8.9ms drive from Scan for 44 quid, so I now have a replacement external drive with twice the capacity for only the cost of the hard drive.
Don’t forget to set the hard drive jumpers to be ‘Master’.
Very good information. Have you since tried any larger sizes like 500GB and do they work in the same enclosure ?
Mark, No not yet, but my other LaCie 200GB drive has recently died, so I’m looking to replace the HDD in that too. The issue is that the choice of PATA (IDE) drives is getting smaller as most new drives tend to be SATA.
Thanks for the tutorial.
I just installed a 500GB Hitachi Deskstar drive on a d2 case (that formerly housed a dying WD Caviar 250). Works like a charm.
Remember to set the jumpers to master.