LaCie Shows Off Massive 7.5TB Network Hard Drive: 5big Network
October 8th, 2008 4:49 PM | by Christen da Costa | 3 Comments
The Big5 Network drive from Lacie, which mind you looks ‘oh so’ HAL from ‘200l’, is a massive network storage hard drive. It’s available in 2.5TB, 5TB and 7.5TB sizes and features RAID 5 and 6 protection. A special added feature is the built-in Torrent client for automatically downloading files. Located at the rear of the device are 5 hard drive slots, 1.5TB each, that can be placed under lock and key for added security. The 1GB Ethernet port should insure zippy transfers over the network and its aluminum casing with cyclops like status light adds a refined touch to any tech geek’s room. According to Lacie it uses 25% less energy than traditional four-disk RAID towers and is 37% quieter thanks to it unique cooling system.
The 5Big Network is available here and starts at $900
More pics after the ‘leap’
Tags: Hard Drives, Lacie
This product is a total nightmare. OS interface looks like it was written by a geek back in the 90’s and the product basically doesn’t work. The RAID 5 takes about 3 days to configure itself. Each time I try to copy my iPhoto library (40GB) to it, after about 2 hours it fails, gives an error message and although you can see the unit online, it is unreachable and requires a hard reboot. After reboot, the RAID thinks it needs to configure itself and takes another 3 days to ’synchronize’. What a disaster. Did LaCie even bother to test this before they shipped it? Speaking of support … another nightmare. It takes days and weeks to get things solved. I have 7 LaCie products. In the past 2 years, I have had 2 power supplies fail, a big4 Quadra have the entire array ‘disappear’ when I changed the firewire port (LaCie say there is nothing wrong with the box) and now this big5 which doesn’t even work out of the box (and I’ll probably RMA. LaCie support is dismal with only e-mail support available in my region. Storage is critical, you’d think they would provide proper support? You’d think?
Greg,
You must’ve gotten a bad system. The one I purchased worked perfectly right out of the box and was very easy to configure and sync. However……the drives in this NAS cannot be formated with NTFS so I had to return it.
What the heck is LaCie thinking in this day and age to have a NAS that doesn’t support NTFS???
My experience is closer to Greg’s, but still wrestling with it. I just got a 5Big with 2TB drives in it. It only seemed to accept files from my mac at 8MB/sec (on gigabit switch). It seemed to hang after just a few hours of use, such that I had to unplug it. It has been running for 3 days “synchronizing” and seems to always report 1 day more to go. While it is doing this it only accepts writes at about 4MB/sec.
I tried to upload a harddrive to it with their one-button system, but that failed. I will try again when it has syched.
I would think they would make this writable through USB, but not the case.
For a cool new gadget, the honeymoon has been bumpy.