For a while I was planning to succumb my data hoarder tendencies to the extend of finally moving a lot of stuff I still had scattered in “cold storage” onto a new nas build, I planned on doing with a Raspberry Pi 4 and a couple of SATA to USB adapters inside an old Mac Pro case, but then a friend had a LaCie Quadra 4Big USB3 drive available including 4 4TB Seagate drives for a steal, so I took it of his hands, thinking this would do just fine for my purpose (I’d have two more copies of everything on there anyways)
Now about the curious part: on my M1 MacBook it shows up and I can format the disk, write and read from it as I should. But plugging it into both the Raspberry Pi intended for this purpose as well as my Linux Desktop running ElementaryOS, I can’t see it in lsblk. It does show up under lsusb however. Am I missing a driver for this thing? (does it need one?) Or am I overlooking something else entirely? This is rather unexpected…
Not all LaCie drive enclosures are created equal, some models don’t require drivers and other models require drivers.
Within the media/content creation field LaCie products are popular for their multi-disk(RAID) solutions, however you aren’t missing anything as their products are heavily reliant upon the MacOS or Windows driver which makes them fairly limited for multi-OS environments. When I did design work some folks had to do network share LaCie drives from a Mac when working with some Linux tasks(Blender).
I’d still suggest looking at the drivers on MacOS, sometimes the chipset is encoded in the device ID under System Profiler and it could be possible to figure out what unofficial drivers may work with it–when it comes to Linux if the drivers aren’t “free/opensource” most devices are paper weights.
If you have a spare PC which can run a light-weight BSD, it might be possible to use the LaCie drive in a network form–OS X drivers on some devices can be modded to run on BSD.