Totaled my Porsche

2008-04-26

As you might recall I bought a pair of Lacie Porsche 500GB disks some time ago. Well, a few weeks ago the power supply of one of them began making funny noises and it was getting harder to start up the Porsche. The disk worked fine with the power supply that came with the other drive so the problem was that the power supply was broken.

This happened just outside the warranty of the disk. So the fix was to order a new power supply from Lacie. I looked up how to do that on the website and discovered that these things cost around 35€ which is quite a lot to invest in a disk that now sells under 100€. Besides, I’m kind of annoyed with all those bricks below my desk anyway.

So I went for option number two: pry open the casing and put the disk in the PC. Thanks to this post, I figured out how to do this. Unfortunately, I did end up making a few scratches on the plastic. It is indeed quite tricky to do this properly. But I’m not going to use it anyway.

A quick look in the windows disk properties confirmed that my disk indeed was a sata disk (a samsung). So I took apart my PC, plugged the disk in and put everything together (after a short trip to the store for a second SATA cable). For some reason the first drive was plugged into the second SATA port so after boot, it couldn’t find the OS. A quick trip to the bios allowed me to swap which drive is treated as the first disk and I was back in business.

Let me know if you have a use for a empty Lacie Porsche case with some minor scratches and without a power supply (you can take the broken one of course). You should be able to put in any SATA disk. For 5€ or a (nice) beer it is yours.