hello again!
time for a bit freaky question... has anyone done this before? ok, read on before answering...
some time ago my lacie 1tb bigger disk has stopped working. no lights, no hard drive spining, nothing... so it seems that the controller has reached it's end of life, swapping the power supply didn't change anything. or at least, as the hard drives are working (tested them one for one already), i suppose it must be the controller 
what i want to do now (as i desperately need the data on the crashed one): i have got another 1tb bigger disk with a working controller, working drives and a working power supply. is it possible to just swap the drives from one controller to the other one?
(i suppose it must be raid 0, as the drive has got 4x 250gb ata drives in it)
i would appreciate any input on this topic! thanks a lot, chris.
if the controller is the same in each one (same chipset) and the drives are already formatted, yes it is possible.
One thing to check first... with the lacie drives, even though they look sleek and have a really big price tag, they are built like a flaming pile of dog excrement. Commonly, there is no strain relief and very poor soldering on the cable connectors. Check to see if the cable connector on the controller is loose/wiggling/visually broken/etc. if not, it still wouldnt hurt to reflow the solder on it and see what happens. most likely the connector is just broken... unless its not powering up at all... then check the power connector for the same thing.
/Bill
Yes, it's physically possible. But whether you'll be able to get your data back depends on whether the drives in your original enclosure were controlled by a software or hardware RAID. If OS X did the RAID management on the drives, then it should be as simple as swapping the drives. If the controller board in the LaCie enclosure had hardware RAID, however, then you might be stuck, depending on how the RAID controller is engineered. (Properly engineered RAID cards store the RAID setup info on the drives themselves, so that if the card fails, you can swap cards and keep your data.) If the card stores the RAID setup info in flash memory instead of on the drives themselves, then you'll have to set up an identical RAID in the new enclosure first before you swap the drives, and then hope that it works.
I've got several of the LaCie 500GB BDE jobbies and they're a HW raid setup. I just wish I could run the drives any way I'd like (eg: separately, or as a pair of redundant drives.) Stupid HW raid.
Oh, in answer, I don't know, but if the controllers are identical swapping the controller between boxes ought to give you your best shot at recovering your data. Make sure all drive IDs remain the same, once you mess with those you're pooped.
dan k
okidoki. i was taking a look at all the cables, the two boards inside the enclosure. nothing seemed to be damaged (at least not in a way that you could tell it visually). so i opened the second enclosure, swapped the drives, plugged it in ... and ... yeah, nothing happend. dead. no led, no spinning of the drives, nothing. hmmm...
ok, so i disassembled everything, popped one of those 4 hdd's after another on the ide port of my G5 and - et voilá - two drives were dead. seems the controller has gone.
next step: swap controllers... and this is finally where bad luck strikes at last: the other lacie bigger disk had completely different controllers on these maxtor disks. i tried to get a hand on similar controllers for about a week now, at the moment, i'm stuck at this point. i guess i will just throw the enclosure away and keep the 20gb drives as spares.
damn, and i was so hopeful to get that thing running again
thanks for your help, guys!
forgot to mention: if the controller is the same, it works. just swap the drives and be careful to put them back in the same position. Switch on drive - TADA - drive is back again.
thanks for your help!