LaCie F.A. Porsche edition 500GB disassembled
November 3, 2007
As I was looking for an external hard drive lately to replace my Packard Bell 400GB external disk (due to a power adaptor failure), I bought a LaCie F.A. Porsche edition today.
One of the reasons to choose for LaCie is that the power adaptor should be better than the ones that come with other external disks (which are often without branding).
Before I bought it it was unclear to me which hard disk was inside: some versions seem to include a Seagate, others a WD. All I knew is that I didn’t want a Maxtor or a Toshiba (do they still make disks?). So I went to the shop and decided to open it myself.
On the pictures on the internet, one could think that the whole box is in brushed aluminium. This is not true: only the front and the back side are brushed alu, and the bottom plate is alu as well. The box itself is plastic.
One of the problems was to open the box. As I read on the comments on this site, thin plastic should be used. That’s the way indeed, but still it took me a long time without damaging the box.
Turn your box upside down, take your VISA and stick it between the alu bottom plate and the plastic case. Try to feel where the clips are; however: these are not symmetric at both sides. On the long sides there are 4 clips and on the small side where the power adaptor should go, another clip can be found. This clip can be used to put some tension on the plate (using a screw driver) when one side has been released.
After the bottom plate has been removed, the SATA connector, the power connector and the 4 screws can be removed too. Still, the hard disk won’t open: 4 little irons have to be plied first. This is quite strange to me, but it is clearly the only way to remove the hard disk from its cage. Apparently, this version contains a Samsung HD501LJ SATA hard disk (500GB, 7200rpm, 16 MB cache)
There is a small USB cable included, which is very nice because a large one can be purchased and a small one is difficult to find.
Some pictures:
Entry Filed under: Hardware. Tags: 500GB, disassembled, dismantled, hard disk, hard drive, LaCie, Porsche, SATA.
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1.
Ray | November 16, 2007 at 3:27 am
Thanks for this article – it’s really helpful as I’m attempting to do the same thing on a 250GB model
.
How did you get the clips open with the card? I’ve only had a brief go so far, but it does seem quite difficult!
2.
pressworthly | November 18, 2007 at 4:42 pm
It is quite difficult indeed. I used several plastic cards to open the box at one side first, then I used a flathead screwdriver on one of the released clips to put some tension on the bottom plate.
A VISA might be too thick. I used my plasticized library card too which is slightly thinner.
3.
tabares | February 16, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Hi, do you know where I can buy the same HD Model? it looks like I burned it and need to see if I can recover my information changin the logic card.
Thank you
4.
pressworthly | February 17, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Sure, try amazon.
5.
migailov | March 12, 2008 at 2:34 pm
thanks for the article.
I just bought a LaCie 500Gb today.
However, I was able to see the specs of the HD in windows explorer.
No need to open it, right?
Sometimes I have to fight my curiosity too
6.
pressworthly | March 12, 2008 at 3:07 pm
That’s correct, but I wanted to make sure that I knew how to open the box, so that in case of a failure I can try to copy the data myself and I don’t have to ‘rely’ on the shop where I bought it (that will most likely just replace everything so the data is gone)
7.
od | March 14, 2008 at 6:19 am
Guess it ain’t my luck with my first purchase of WD hdd. All these while I’ve been using maxtor and they have never let me down. But my first less than-a-year WD just went kaput, all of the sudden. Ah well, like I said, prolly it’s just not my luck.
8.
dougfal | March 25, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Be careful when you reassemble these units to replace the plastic strips under the metal tangs where the screws go. Mine would not spin up or mount with these missing, once you replace the bottom cover – even if it does before that. Go figure!
9.
warper | April 4, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Hey mate! thanks for the info, it has been very useful as I needed to get the drive out of the LaCie box (the AC/DC adaptor was dead).
10.
Apple nut | April 7, 2008 at 8:14 pm
=============================
SONGS THAT ARE GOOD ON RADIO
1) I have been a model for love
2) Teddy Bears – Punk Rocker
=============================
Eric bday Oct20th!
Amy Bday Feb 12
Go to the topper place and get info on mounting the thing
–replace foam?
–get something for mounting like a bracket
–get 2×4s to raise even higher
–wash it out
–get a new key
CaflischScriptPro
Hitachi HDT725032VLAT80
I am a solid mac junky (since the 80s). Lacie was their partner in external drives for years. I have an older Porsche 160gb and it has stood through the ages and is EXCELLENT. I have dropped it so many times….yes…nothing has ever hurt it. I carry it in my school bag as backup for my laptop.
Last week I bought a second Lacie Porsche that was on sale (discontinued 320gb 7200rpm model). It is exactly the same shell with the exact same power supply. This drive made NOISE (My first one is 100% silent when writing). The 320gb new one is only quiet when doing absolutely nothing. When you write to the drive there is a constant chucking (metal on metal thumping) noise.
We read many posts that they said that it was an issue with the power supply, so we called Lacie (phone number on website) We were on hold an average of 30minutes before talking to anyone EVERY time we called (called 4-5 times in the end). They promised to send one within 2 days. It has been two weeks now!!!!! Nothing has arrived. After calling and being on hold for more than 40 minutes (7 customers before us on hold), they said that they didn’t have supplies in stock and it would be weeks. POOR SERVICE! What the HECK! this supply has never change for any of the drives–not a special part!
Lacie said they would replace the drive if it had trouble after getting the new powersupply….should be trust them? NO…we read hundred of posts from others that Lacie will not replace the drive unless it fails–not for being unreliable or noisy.
Then I used my brain…duh…I swapped out the cord with the one on our older drive (EXACT SAME CORD). The noise persisted! The cord was not the problem. It is clearly the hard drive or box.
I investigated the HD. I had read before purchasing this drive that Lacie was using a Seagate barracuda 320gb drive in this model (a drive with a 5 year warrantee and why I purchased this particular Lacie and not the 500 GB). This was not what I got! Inside the Lacie Porsche 320GB is a Hitachi HDT725032VLAT80. I looked up reviews on this drive and they are bad. Noisly and failure are constant issues–problems starting from day one and failing in a year or less.
FINAL WORD: If your drive is no 100% silent when writing to the disk RETURN IT IMMEDIATELY and get another. There are only a few drive manufacturers and all the manufacturers make bum models–so brand name is not as important as the drive model. Look up the model of the drive in your Lacie (on a mac you can read it information in disk utility). Then newegg.com is a great place to read about each drive, so you can see if the drive enclosed is a good one.
11.
greylion | April 9, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I just bought a 250GB LaCie, very cheap (demo product), actually just for the drive.
I also wondered how to open it, since there are NO screws.
I took a thin butter knife, the edge is not sharp and it has no “teeth”.
Inserted it at the edges of the bottom plate (in the sides, not at the ends), about 5-7 mm in (1/4-1/3 inch), and carefully forced the bottom plate out, one edge at a time.
The casing has small notches that lock into holes in the bottom plate, four in the left side, five in the right side, none at the front and back.
The bottom is aluminum, not plastic, and can take a little abuse. The rest of the casing is plastic though.
12.
Ronan Curran | April 25, 2008 at 10:43 am
Thanks for the info – I used 4 old credit/store cards and the bottom lid came off smoothly with no damage and no need to use a screwdriver. Just wedge them down each side about 8mm and voila – the lid will pop right out. If it gets awkward – work the cards by sliding them gently up and down the length of the case and it will eventually pop out.
13. www.jillesvangurp.com : Totaled my Porsche | April 26, 2008 at 11:08 am
[...] I went for option number two: pry open the casing and put the drive in the machine. Thanks to this post, I figured out how to do this. Unfortunately, I did end up making a few scratches on the [...]
14.
Jan | June 7, 2008 at 7:57 am
I bought the new Lacie Poulsen disk 500GB. I like Lacie and they keep up a good rep.. but this one was a goner in just two days.
Sounds like a diskwasher and there’s nowhere to be read what kind of disk’s in side (don’t remember from reading it before) or what interface is between the disk and the USB controller.
It used to start and it got stuck at the same block but apperad as a unit (didn’t mount but you could tell it was there and you could use a tool like i did. Now it’s just a yuppie brick making annoying sounds. I believe hey still go with samsungs (think it had about the same name as my other Lacie).
Your disassembly has been of much use to me. Now I can do it too and use my other computer to see if I can recover whatever’s still in side the disk and replace it with just a new disk instead of buying a whole new device
Big thanks!!
15.
Manfred | June 19, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Your posting was helpful for me. I have an old 160GB Lacie Porsche Design drive which I could not figure out how to open. It was very similar to open as your HD case. In my 160GB Lacie drive there were 9 nobs, 4 on one of the long sides, 5 on the other long side, zero on the short sides (LED and power connector side). The nobs do not line up. Using a credit card and a thin screw driver I got the case open. Inside was an IDE ATA (PATA) disk.
Thnx for your hint.
16.
Matt B | July 8, 2008 at 6:50 pm
The power supply just died in my 300GB model, so this was very helpful. Thank you!
17.
Bart | August 24, 2008 at 12:33 am
This is how I assembled my Lacie:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bartclaeys/2462751424/in/photostream/
18.
DGH | October 7, 2008 at 9:30 pm
On the 250 GB Lacie Porsche I easily opened the case by inserting 4 plastic VISA-size mebership cards on the long sides. Then took a small screwdriver on the inner side in the middle and forced the plate up without damaging anything.
19.
Seafire | December 4, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Hi guys, I bought a Lacie/Porsche 500GB HD about 1½ years ago, and now it’s full (damn those raw videofiles!). I was going to update to a new 1TB Lacie drive, but it seems they have discontinued the design, and I really like the silver box.
I was wondering, would it be possible to open the case, remove the old drive, and insert a new 1TB drive in its place? Will the PSU give enough power and might there be any other complications?
I’d really appreciate if you could give this tech noob some advice
20.
pressworthly | December 6, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Seafire, I can confirm the 1TB drive should work fine with the same PSU.
Bigger drives generally do not consume more power. Even more: newer drives generally consume less energy. Good luck!
21.
Eduardo | December 6, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Hi guys I have a very similar question to Seafire’s. I just ordered a I had a LaCié Porsche edition with a Samsung 500GB drive that simply died. I just bought a 1.5TB hard drive but I just read a few comments from people that say larger drives might not work with the controller card that came with my LaCie (they don’t specifically talk about my particular card) But I am curious as to wether or not I should just return the 1.5tb drive? or maybe it will work?
Thanks
22.
Eduardo | December 7, 2008 at 12:47 am
EDIT to my previous post:
I meant to say I currently have a LaCie external drive which had a Samsung drive that died, and I just ordered a new 1.5tb internal drive from amazon yesterday….
23.
Seafire | December 9, 2008 at 12:26 am
Thanks for your advice pressworthly! There’s a Lacie 1TB external HD on discount near here, that new ugly black box, half of my friends bought the 500GB model and many of them have had problems with the PSU and cable. It doesn’t have a power button and I guess the quality is generally low. So I think I’ll buy the 1TB version of it, and just scavenge the HD for my Porsche
24.
Eduardo | December 9, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Seafire: If I understood correctly you’re saying the PSU on the 500GB Porsche box is in general bad, and you don’t like the new black box so you’re gonna take out the hard drive out of the NEW black box and put it inside the one you claim has given your friends problems?
- could you tell me what the PSU issues are? and what do you mean by no power button????
- I have a 500gb and it turns on and everything but the drive seems to be dead, it’s constantly clicking.
PS to everyone else
I still would like to know if it would be possible for me to hook up a 1.5TB drive inside my 500GB Porsche box.
25.
Seafire | December 10, 2008 at 10:26 am
Eduardo:
“you’re saying the PSU on the 500GB Porsche box is in general bad”
Nope, I was talking about this Lacie HD: http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11050 (the black box). Two people I know had a faulty PSU, it started to emit weird noises and soon quit alltogether. Third one had a power spike of some sort and blew the whole HD. This all with the 500 GB version. I myself have had a Porsche box for 1½ years now, and never had any sort of problems with it.
So I wasn’t going to take Porsche HD and put it into the Black Lacie external drive, but the other way around.
About your situation: I don’t know if it’s a good idea to put a working HD into a faulty External HD case, might be that you end up losing both drives. :-/
26.
Eduardo | December 11, 2008 at 9:09 am
I couldn’t find an answer to my question regarding the LaCié box supporting a 1.5TB drive so I decided to try it out for myself.
I took the broken 500GB drive out of the LaCié enclosure, bought a Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB and put it inside the enclosure, formatting it while in the usb enclosure was taking forever and Vista said the format could not be completed a couple of times. I only have a laptop pc.
So I took my new drive and plugged it into a friend’s Desktop PC and formatted it there, it completed succesfully then I flashed the Firmware to SD1A as recommended on another site, which is supposed to fix some freezing issues that were reported on this drive (originally it came with firmware SD17, I bought from Amazon for $129 by the way) and now I have just put it back inside my LaCié box and it’s working fine so far. Showing 1.36TB or available disk space.
27.
Seafire | December 13, 2008 at 6:34 am
Eduardo: I wrote you a reply to your previous message, but it’s still awaiting moderation (due url in it). Anyway, good to hear that your HD swap worked!
28.
Michelasso | December 15, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Thank you very much. My Lacie 500GB has always been noisy and got worse. I simply couldn’t stand it. Following your instructions I opened it and moved few things around, hold the screws very tight and now it’s as silent as it had to! The fan is not spinning though. I thought it was it, but I am not sure, probably is was just a resoanca effect. Do you think it starts to spin once it overheats?
29.
Paul | January 4, 2009 at 1:36 am
I posted instructions for doing the same thing to the “LaCie Little Disk, Design by Sam Hecht” here:
http://thefire.us/archives/172
30.
Seafire | January 5, 2009 at 10:48 am
Ok, so I bought the other Lacie HD just before christmas, and swapped the HDs succesfully. Works like charm, and is quieter and runs much cooler. Even if I watch HD quality videos from the disk for hours, it’s barely hotter than my hand.
Thanks for all your help guys!
31.
Seafire | January 5, 2009 at 10:56 am
Almost forgot, here’s some pictures:
http://bayimg.com/image/eamibaabm.jpg
32.
fishbrain | January 11, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Today I dropped my portable LaCie Poulson drive. Still don;t know if dead or not. I need to open the enclosure but I am unable to do so. I tried using cards along the sides but its not working. The switch on the back will be hard because it sticks out of the case.
Has anyone opened a Poulson drive?
Many thanks in advance.
33.
kirti | January 17, 2009 at 1:13 pm
any idea how to disassemble LaCie d2 disk? any web link or article about that? thank you in advance.
34.
kirti | January 17, 2009 at 2:26 pm
ok. i found it. easy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax390l2A-AY
.
35.
fishbrain | January 17, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Hi Kirti, this is not the Poulson design. Thanks all the same. I managed to get it open by putting business cards all around the edges and thus unlocking the locks… then i started from the back pushing the switch inwards while pushing the case outwards and sliding it slowly out… from then on it was easy…
The case came out without any scratches…. next day a friend of mine got some recovery tools and I started to try and recover as much as possible. I was successful.
Thanks.
36.
Some guy | February 1, 2009 at 1:38 am
Thanks for this. The exploded view photos helped me.
37.
driveman | February 11, 2009 at 8:04 pm
I have the 500 Porsche Drive (laCie) with the horrible noise that would start and then stop… over and over. Very loud and annoying. Convinced that the drive was going to fail, I followed the above directions and opened the case with no problem.
I plugged the drive in and forced it to run some big quicktime files to heat it up to make the fan start running – suspecting that the fan is the culprit. It is.
That little fan is not attached to anything except the power line. so every time it runs, it shakes and vibrates against the case and makes more noise than the 5 other drives that I have running in the same room. I tried to wedge the fan against the case with a piece of plastic – but it didn’t work.
I guess I’ll have to look for a different fan, because the drive itself is quiet. Makes me crazy.
38.
pressworthly | February 11, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Diveman, I might be missing the point here, but the LaCie Porsche 500GB I opened doesn’t have a fan at all?
39.
mysteryclock | May 29, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Well I’ve had two of these drives, one died via the click(s)-of-doom (replaced under warranty) and one PS blew out (replaced slightly out-of-warranty for free) so reliability may not be great but customer service is so far. Now drive # 2 has a fan that has gotten ~profoundly~ noisy — does anyone know where I can get a replacement fan or what the specs are? Is the fan soldered in?
40.
milo | June 16, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Dont buy LaCie!!!!! These have to be the biggest load of junk. Pure land fill. I’ve had 2 of these fail in a very short period of time.
41.
boghound | July 22, 2009 at 9:45 am
Thanks for all the comments. My present raid config is dying so bought a 1T. I’m going to clone the present drives to the 1T and use the Lacie 500g as a cradle (hopefully). Then just insert the cloned disc into the PC and reassemble the Lacie and use as a back-up again.
42.
Remav | August 24, 2009 at 1:37 pm
USE PLASTIC KNIVES, WORKS EZ!
I tried the credit cards. It’s probably doable, but I was making painfully slow progress. Went to our company cafe & grabbed 4 plastic knives. They slide down in easily releasing the 4 tabs and allowing for a screw driver or letter opener to pry the bottom up.
Once you get the bottom off and unplug all the wires simply bend the tabs that the screws go through & the drive falls right out. (the issue with mine turned out to be an issue with the power connector. re soldering the pins should fix it.)
Also a Samsung 500gb SATA drive used in mine.
Model: HD501LJ.
43.
Pinguineo | September 11, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I have the same pb as Driveman. The HD itself seems ok, but this silly fan is making such a noise. It drives me and my wife totally crazy. So I opened it, and I decided to remove it !!! As simply as that.
And now, it is totally quiet !!! I try to monitor the temperature, but, nothing to notice. Peace again !!!