Others say...

"Lacie 2 TB triple2"
Sorry Lacie. I have used your external harddrives for 5 years with no problems. I sent this drive back because it made me sick.The Big blue flashing light is like a strobe light, I tested the drive by loading photos and then pulled one of the drives to simulate a drive failure. The rebuild took 15-24 hours and it kept flashing its 2" blue and red strobe light in my eyes. I had to cover the drive with a black cloth in order to sit at my computer. I returned it and bought a Gardian Maximus from OWC and love this thing. No big blue light to drive me crazy.
I am sure the lacie is fine technically, but if you are sensitive to flashing lights dont buy this drive.

"What Happened to LaCie"
After two of these drives, both with drive errors within hours of setup, I give up.

You should look elsewhere. Drobo and Western Digital both offer comparable and much less expensive alternatives. They're not as pretty, but they can't be any less reliable than LaCie.

After almost a decade of buying LaCie drives, I'm sad to say that this is typical of their recent history with regard to quality. I've had two other LaCie's fail in the past year and another is starting to make funny noises only a year after purchase. Maybe it's time to stop being such a loyal LaCie customer.

"Almost perfect"
When looking to purchase a backup solution I had a pretty good idea what I wanted (reliable RAID1 with swappable drives) and I have had good experiences with LaCie in the past. I ordered the LaCie 2Big Triple and got just what I asked for, no surprises good or bad. Just switch the dial, plug it in, do a quick format and your data is safe. I do, however, have some notes for those who don't like to read spec sheets.

Notes to Customers:
1) This drive is rather large - think big Kleenex box
2) That blue light is huge! It's a little distracting in a dark room, but I put the drive on the floor and stuck a post-it on it.
3) 1TB = 2 500 GB drives. You could just by a 1 TB drive these days and have it be a third the (physical) size.
3) RAID 1 = 500 GB mirror: you only get half the space.
4) "triple" means USB, firewire 400, firewire 800.
I have several "quadra" drives from LaCie that include eSATA and I love it. Firewire 800 is pretty quick though, daisy chainable too.

Notes to LaCie:
1) The "swappable" drives are not easily swappable. While they do come out, I struggled with it for a while
2) Make that light smaller. Please.
3) eSATA?
4) The mode dial is unclear. Why not use a real switch?

I realize this review sounds a little critical, but they are really just notes. I love this drive and it is very comforting to put aside the worry of hard drive failure and if I ever need the space I have an extra 500GB just a turn of a dial away.

FYI: Mean time of failure for hard drives is ~2 years, now just think about how old your computer is...


"Lacie 2 Big Triple - Big, Fast and Stylish"
I've been using the 1TB 2 Big Triple for a few weeks now with my Mac Pro.
Here are my initial impressions:

The drive is very solidly constructed and comes with quality cables, a tool to remove the stand, a screwdriver to set the RAID mode switch, software disks and a power brick.
It works well with Time Machine.
In its default RAID 0 mode, it's fast. Using Firewire 800 it seems about the same speed as an internal drive to me.

The removable drive trays were quite stuck at first, but after getting them out, they slide in and out OK. The finger slots don't give one good leverage to pull out the drive(s), so watch out for owies.

Mine contains 2 Seagate 7200.10 500 GB hard drives that seem to run pretty warm and occasionally make loud clicking (seek) noises, even when idle. I have an older 7200.9 (in a generic enclosure) that does exactly the same things so it's probably not a cause for concern.
Because the drives get very warm, the temperature-controlled fan comes on and stays on after about 20 minutes. I think maybe installing some cooler-running drives would reduce this tendency to run warm.

The tiny, recessed RAID mode switch requires the use of a small screwdriver (included) to turn. This is a good thing because moving the switch from one mode to another will destroy your data! One little thing: The mode switch on mine is slightly mis-marked as the JBOD position is actually midway between the JBOD and FAST markings.

The "ON-AUTO-OFF" switch has been known to hiccup once or twice. It seems that "OFF" is not a "Hard" OFF, and sometimes acts like the "AUTO" position. Turning it "ON" then "OFF" seems to reset it OK.

It's not perfect, but it's still my 2nd best external drive, the best one being my smaller and slower Lacie d2 Quadra 320.

Have Fun,
Keri

Update: After removing the hot and noisy 512MB Seagate drives, I installed 2 WD Green Power 1TB drives for a total of 2TB in "FAST" (RAID0) mode. These drives are far better suited to the 2Big Triple as they run much quieter and so much cooler that the 2Big's cooling fan seldom comes on.

"Not quite a NAS as we would like..."
I am using the LaCie 1.5 TB NAS since January'08 and I don't proudly say that after months of tests and use I feel I wasted my money; it is one of those devices made solely to make your office beautiful...

Bad performance and weak interface are its major faults. SMB is slower than some old flash drives I have. The HTTP GUI for end users is useless. The admin interface (also HTTP) looks nice but is unstable; in some cases you won't even see the space available in the internal disks! The NAS operating system resides in the storage disks, not in the motherboard as I would expect in that device class.

The RAID-1 works tough. I've had one of the internal disks crash after 2 months and no data was lost. LaCie did not replace my HDD since they want the entire box shipped back to them, something I cannot do since I am using the data in it.

Bottom line: I beautiful device to have as embellishment, but definitively not adequate for those who know what a NAS is and need one to do serious business. Newbies may like it. Geeks may enjoy hacking the Linux that runs in it as well.