LaCie drive, part II

So at the suggestion of the helpful LaCie tech support dude, I tried
another USB cable I had lying around and shit, that fixed it.
Surprising to get a bad cable these days, but I did. They should
really check their supplier -- sucks to make people think your
hardware is bogus when it's just a cheapo dead cable. So the massive
mac-dad 500gb drive works fine, condemnation retracted.