LaCie d2 Professional 18TB External Hard Drive, USB-C, USB 3.1 Gen 2, 7200 RPM, Enterprise Drives, for Mac and PC Desktop, 1 month Adobe CC All Apps Plan, Rescue Services

Excellent, direct telephone Support to clarify partitioning, merging, et al. Decade + ongoing Support from Seagate and so very strong, consistent. Have their HDD(s), SSD(s), NAS, now LaCie. All performing well and optimized for personal needs.

Bought this as a backup to remedy a storage issue I was having with another hard drive and so when I got it, I started dumping all the wedding footage I had from this year onto it. Yes--one of 'those' stories. Seemed to be fine at first. 7 weddings that filled just under 3TB of this 18TB drive. Then loaded some older 2022 projects on there to do some further editing on for maybe social or something. Loaded wedding #8, a 2 day wedding so lots of footage and that was fine. Then after the following weekend when I was loading wedding #9, I woke up to an error message about the drive. Ejected, unplugged, replugged. Same error. Plugged into a different computer. Same error. But then I plugged it back into my main computer and the error stopped popping up. But then I noticed that wedding #8 was pretty light on storage. I went to check and just about all the footage files showed 0 bytes. [Screenshot] gray highlighted clips: there is one file that you can see the thumbnail for that is 67.4mb. The rest are 0. [screenshot] blue highlighted clips: all the same files selected aside from the one that was 67.4mb to show 0 bytes. File structure was still intact, but the files had nothing and weren't able to be opened. Yikes Tried to copy over to other drives/folders- nothing. Finally called tech support for the drive. The first lady tried to help gather info to help me and is the only reason why tech got 2 stars instead of 1. The 2nd guy just said since I can see the files it wasn't the drive, it was the camera/footage and the files are corrupted. I asked him about the software and he gave that to me but to no avail. I'm online looking for alternatives (Disk Drill actually helped me recover all the files from all cameras, aside from my main camera so...almost perfect, but im skipping ahead). So I start checking in some of my other video folders for other projects as I try to troubleshoot and lo-and-behold: other folders are now having this issue. Not even just these new videos I've shot, but older projects I'd already delivered months ago, but I had moved to this drive as an alternate backup plan. Multi-cam shoots where whole camera folders that were once 100-200GB worth of data now showing around 30GB, with most files now showing a size of 0 bytes. Devastating. I've moved most of my files to other drives. All of my projects had been backed up to other drives anyway, aside from the one big wedding that hadn't had a chance to backup yet. Thankfully, Disk Drill was able to recover all the files from 3 of my 4 cameras, unfortunately, I'm still trying to salvage footage from that main camera. Side note: that blue light is annoyingly bright and when it's copying and continuously flashing like that it's horrible to look at. I put some painters tape over it. [screenshot]

Just got it and it seems to meet my needs.

You can see from the photo after trying the included cable which would not stay in, and multiple others, finally I got one to activate the drive and used white gaffing tape to secure it from falling out. Seems to work ok, like the one sitting next to it, but time will tell.

The only hard drives we’ve every had that have crashed have all been LaCie so we decided to not purchase again. But last year we did purchase several of these anyway and last week one of them crashed. We are in the process of returning it, a process that goes through Seagate and which seems designed to make you give up in frustration. We have yet to receive a replacement.

Works fast and efficiently as a Time Machine backup drive. Using with Monterey OS. Sleek design fits right in with the 10TB one I bought previously. All the drives in this style no matter the capacity seem to have the same profile and physical size, so they sit harmoniously on my desk, and since they are built to operate vertically, they take up much less space then other brands that lie flat.

If you want a solidly built external drive that is fast and reliable, then this is your drive. Note that it has a bright blue light. It is the brightest light I have ever had on any computer equipment. This might be an issue for some folks. The light communicates the following: -- Solid light: drive is connected and powered on. It is idle. -- Blinking light: the drive is busy (reading and/or writing data). -- Very slow blinking: the drive is powered on, but disconnected. This will happen, for example, if you tell Windows to disconnect the drive. The light doubles as a power button. It takes some effort to press it in. But it is a button. So if the drive becomes unresponsive, and you need to power cycle it, you do not need to pull the plug. You can press the blue lit button. Note that you have to press and hold it for a few seconds to make it power off (this prevents accidental power loss to the drive if someone mistakenly presses the button).