Deleting RAID in LaCie drives.

[gutz]

Hello, a few years ago I bought a LaCie HDD of 500 GB. The warranty already expired when it started to show signs of problems. Eventually the HDD failed to the point that I could not use it. I opened the case and saw that there where two HDD of 250 GB each so I realized that maybe just one of the HDD is bad while the other is in good conditions. The problem is that they seem to be under some kind of RAID (I don't know much about RAID but it should be RAID 0 as it joins both drives to make "one"). I tried to remove the RAID somehow in Disk Utility but nothing shows up under the RAID section. I tried to open RAID Utility but it says my computer does not support it. Can anybody please help me to remove the raid and use just one (the healthy drive)? It should be simple but I am ignorant in this area.

Also, which program may I use to check which is the healthy and the bad drive? Does such program exists?

Thank you very much! Hope you can help!

[PathDaemon]

LaCie hard drives use RAID-0. That means that if one drive goes bad, you lose all your data. You can't remove one without destroying the data either. So, GET YOUR FILES OFF THAT THING NOW.

The RAID is done in hardware in the enclosure, and Disk Utility can't talk to it. I'm not intimately familiar with how LaCie's RAID controllers work, but if you remove or disconnect one of the disks (after backing up your data!) it SHOULD just show you the remaining disk — but it will appear to be empty. (If so, you can format it and keep using it.)

As for testing (and I'm not making any promises about how this is going to work), remove one disk from the enclosure and power it back up. If you see a 250GB disk in Disk Utility, cmd+I on it and note the disk identifier (should be "disk1", "disk2", etc.). In Terminal, run "dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/null" (replacing 1 with the number from Disk Utility). It won't output anything for a WHILE, but, after a few hours or overnight, you may see a few messages about I/O errors. If so, there's your bad drive. Repeat the test with the other hard drive.

If one-drive-in-the-LaCie doesn't work, put each drive in a PC and run Seagate's SeaTools testing suite on it.

If you replace the bad drive in the LaCie with the (if possible) same model and size, it should start working again.