Sheesh-- I meant Terrabyte!

<<Last spring I bought a Gigabit Lacie Drive--and it's failing already!>>

I never buy a prebuilt drive in a case. I alwasy buy seagate hard drives and put them into a case myself. It is so easy you can't believe it. The case will have two cables inside that plug into the drive in an unmistakable way. There will a couple screws to hold the case together. That's it. Once you've put it together you plug in its power supply and a USB or Firewire cable and your mac will recognize it and ask to initialize it. Click "Initialize" (or whatever the prompt is) and it will open up Disk Utility where you can give the drive a name and it will prepare it for use. You've just save $50-$100 and you have a much higher quality hard drive.

I recommend Seagate drives. You can get a Seagate 1TB drive for $114 from Amazon:

www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST.../ref=sr_1_4

You can get a compatible enclosure for $17.33

www.amazon.com/Antec-MX-1.../ref=sr_1_2

You can shop around for enclosures and drives -- the difference in cost may be the shipping, so check the shipping costs. You can also go into a computer store such as central computer and get a much better deal (no shipping):

Seagate 1TB drive $109.95:
www.centralcomputers.com/comme...ct.jsp

Yes, and I'd recommend OtherWorldComputing
eshop.macsales.com/shop/fir.../EliteAL/

Mercury Elite Pro-AL 0GB 'Add your own HD' Kit without Software (depending on the connections you desire):
- 0GB FireWire 400 + USB 2.0 Combo [Oxford934 - uses SATA 3.5" HDs] $69.99
- 0GB FireWire 400 + USB 2.0 Combo [Oxford911+ - uses standard ATA/IDE HDs] $54.99
- 0GB FireWire 800/400 + USB 2.0 Combo [Oxford912 - uses standard ATA/IDE HDs] $74.99
- NEW! 0GB Quad eSATA FireWire 800/400 + USB 2.0 [Combo Oxford 924 - uses SATA 3.5" HDs] $109.99

Plus:
Any of the Seagate drives @ eshop.macsales.com/search/S...ard+Drive
My personal fav, 1.5TB Seagates.... :D


This said, my next device is likely to be a Drobo. I already have 2 externals (1 @ 1TB, the other @ 1.5TB) hanging off my Mac mini media server, so when that finally starts running out of capacity (I've got a couple hundred GB free still), I'll be looking for the expandable capacity that Drobo offers.

Of course, this depends on what the next Mac mini (assuming there is one) looks like.

And Snow Leopard + ZFS might make this a little irrelevant.

That LaCie drive should have a 3 year warranty

i've had two LaCie's fail and i contacted their customer service. After they gave me a bit of a run around to be sure that the drive failed, i mailed it t them and they sent me a repaired drive.

it's definitely worth sending in for repair. and i always register my drives