I'm sure some people have had good luck with LaCie -- but I've just had two LaCie 500 GB drives fail, both of which are a couple of years old. Being the curious type, I opened the external metal enclosures. I was surprised to find that each of the 500GB drives actually consisted of two 250 GB drives (no wonder the external cases were so big and heavy). I was even more surprised to find that inside one of the enclosures were two drives from Western Digital; the other enclosure had two IBM drives. We're talking about the same LaCie model here, identical except for drives from different manufacturers. I also discovered through further testing that all of these drives actually still worked -- it was the LaCie enclosure that went bad.

I've also had bad luck with Seagate (had an external drive that would make a weird tapping noise, then freeze; sent it in to Seagate under warranty after owning it just over 30 days, and got back a replacement drive with exactly the same problem -- and a $25 service charge. Seagate had promised not to bill my credit card, but did anyway, and it took another month to straighten that out.) I'm sure someone has a horror story about every manufacturer, but I can see no reason to buy a drive from LaCie, since they don't really make drives -- might as well just ask for whatever's behind "door number two." And Seagate won't get a third chance to give me a drive that doesn't work. I do own at least half a dozen internal and external drives from Western Digital, and none have given me problems -- yet.