Lacie Hard Disk MAX Quadra Failing

[szczepanek]

I have recently been experiencing problems with my LaCie 2TB Hard Disk MAX Quadra external drive. The drive is still connecting to my iMac (which is running OS 10.11.1 El Capitan) and I am still able to see what is on the drive. The drive is running extremely slow and not opening files, crashing any program I try to open a file with.
The front LED is rapidly flickering blue constantly. The back LED on the bottom is blinking red. The hard drive is set on "FAST" or RAID 0 mode (which I now am realizing how big of a mistake that is.) When ejected from my iMac the drive stops all blinking (front and back LEDs) and is a solid front blue LED like normal.
The manual states that these LED indicators are saying the drive is in RAID 1 Rebuild, which doesn't make sense as I am not using the drive in RAID 1. I'm not sure if it needs to be sent in for repair or if I just need to replace one of the hard drives. Any help would be appreciated. I haven't been able to back up anything on the drive and am worried running a recovery could damage it further.

Thanks for any help/advice!
Allison

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the community, Allison!

This seems very unfortunate as RAID 0 has no redundancy and it's very unlikely you'd be able to recover the data from the external storage device by yourself. 🙁 I'd recommend you to use Disk Utility on your iMac and test the external HDD for defects.
If you are unable to access any of your files afterwards, then I'd recommend you contact the manufacturer's customer support and ask for assistance. They could refer you to a data recovery company and you could also send an RMA request (if the storage device is still under warranty), this way you might get a replacement unit/HDD for your failed one.

Hope this was helpful. Best of luck!
SuperSoph_WD