LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt 3 Dock Failed... seeking replacement options

Hardware
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Back in September, my LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt 3 Dock started acting odd and noisy. Flashing blue light turned into flashing Blue then Red light. My 2018 Mac mini would crash randomly. The 2BT3 Dock was getting warm overall. Researching this issue led me to believe one of the HDDs was failing or the internal fan on the unit may be clogged. Powered down the system, pulled both HDDs and used some compressed air. Some dust/debris was present but not enough to stop the fan. It spun freely with little effort. Reassembled and powered back on to same results. Since this was setup as RAID 1, I decided to see which HDD was failing. Opened the lower bay and pulled drive out slightly. Lo and behold… Light went back to solid blue and mounted on desktop!

OK this is a start in the right direction. I purchased the LaCie 2BT3 Dock in 2014 and almost 10 years of life on an Enterprise grade HDD was a pleasant surprise. (Hadn’t realized how long I had owned this setup) There were 2 - 10TB HDDs installed and I believe we all can agree that when one starts to fail the other one is not far behind. I went shopping for 2 new HDDs and was shocked to find that I could upgrade from 10TB to 20TB for just $30 more per HDD. Drives in the 12TB -18TB range were over $100 higher in cost than the 20TB. Not to look a “gifted horse in the mouth” I quickly placed my order.

Week later the new HDDs arrived and installed one in the lower bay and started to rebuild the RAID 1 setup. Took just over 26 hours for 6TB of data. Moved the new HDD to the upper bay and started the process again. This time it only took 18 hours. I was back in business and happy again!

Until last week when the flashing lights started all over again and the Mac mini crashed. Pulled the lower bay HDD out and the Dock mounted, but only for a few hours. The LaCie 2BT3 Dock will not mount on any computer we have :frowning:

I contacted LaCie/Seagate support back in September and again last week. Frustrating may be an understatement when comes to working with their support team. I am a longtime and loyal fan of LaCie but now I question that loyalty. After mentioning multiple times that “I was YEARS outside of warranty” and just wanted to know if they could sell me a drive-less 2BT3 Dock, they read their script and told me I didn’t qualify for any warranty coverage. They did tell me I could ship the unit to a Service Center for a quote. After looking into that possibility, it seems the only Service Center in the US is a Logistics Company in California who told me they don’t do repairs there but can ship it to LaCie/Seagate IF I have a repair number…

I think I am done with them… Thank you if you have made it this far!

I have tested both of the 10TB and 20TB HDDS with an OWC “toaster” HDD sled. All 4 HDDs passed testing in Disk Utility. I can see data on all 4 HDDs. I have this data copied on other HDDs as well.

What alternatives should I consider???
I truly enjoyed the simplicity of a connected unit with all my Music/Moves/Photos and documents on it. A few friends have suggested of upgrading to a Synology setup. Another brought up OWC’s hardware.

I am setting up a Hardware closet for my router, switch and Hubs so maybe a NAS isn’t such a bad idea.

Bring on your Suggestions and Opinions!

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That’s what I use and I love the thing, with a couple of caveats. Although, if you have your own data closet, I assume most of these won’t be of concern to you. (I am jealous, I was thinking for getting a rack and trying to do my own HomeLab, but I think it would be a money pit.)

You need to do your research and make sure you get a NAS that will accept any drives, not just Synology’s (assuming you go with them). Although I believe that is only a problem in the high-end enterprise devices, but I might be wrong. Also you want a model that will do BTRFS, so it will do the more advance things. The cheaper models aren’t capably of everything because of it.

It’s expensive. Up front costs are high, and you will want an offsite backup, which isn’t cheap either. It’s probably best to get a 4 drive model just so you have room to grow, and drives aren’t expensive, but they add up. I am just running 3 drives in mine.

I have mine set up to run Time Machine on 2 Macs, and do two full backups of two PCs. I back up all my third party storage to it (Google Drive, iCloud, etc), my Photos library, and most importantly I run my own cloud storage on it. I took my documents folder on my main Mac and moved it to my NAS, so I can get to my documents no matter where I am and I don’t need to worry about a third party having control over my stuff. I used to have one set up for streaming movies and music, but I don’t bother with that stuff anymore.

Highly recommended.

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If you use an online backup service you may not be able to include a NAS.

Also consider that a NAS will be slower than Directly Attached Storage (DAS) and the data will likely be stored on a data format chosen by the NAS provider, so you may not be able to pop drives out and mount them on your Mac.

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I am not sure any of them include it. Backblaze you have to use B2 I believe. For Synology you can use their C2 service that is $70/year for 1 TB, and ramps up quickly from there. Since most of what is on mine isn’t important, I don’t back up the whole thing. Synology’s service has more features than a third party and set up is as easy as clicking a button.

That depends. I have seen some pro photographers with 10GbE networks who run SSDs in some of their NAS slots. They can edit as if the photographs were on their machines internal SSD. With video that might be pushing it, but it’s not bad. It’s one of those things where the more money you throw at it, the better.

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All computer storage is a compromise between cost, size and speed. More money, less compromise.

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