Review: Lacie 2big Network network-attached storage
Date : 03 16 2008 Category : Technology
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Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Monday 17 March 2008 at 00:00:00
Choose big storage or Raid protection on this Nas appliance
The Lacie 2big Network is an impressive, professional-looking network-attached storage (Nas) appliance. As the name implies, it's big on storage space, with optional Raid protection also available if needed. The die-cast metal casing is very solid, with lots of fins to aid disk cooling and an external AC adapter to further help in this respect. The whole thing can be desk or rackmounted with two Sata hard disks inside, screwed into separate hot-swappable carriers that slide out at the back. These can be locked into place. The review system included a pair of 500GB Samsung 7,200rpm Sata 3Gbytes/sec disks, giving a maximum usable capacity of just less than 1TB. A 1.5TB version (£348 ex Vat) and 2TB model (£509 ex Vat) are also available and all three can be configured to work in one of two modes. In Big mode the space on the disks is simply concatenated to create one large volume. In Safe 100 mode the two disks are mirrored for Raid 1 protection. The second mode halves the available capacity but adds 100 per cent data redundancy so that, should one of the disks stop working, no data will be lost. A switch at the back is used to set the required mode (using a screwdriver) with a pair of USB ports alongside that can be used in two ways. One is to expand the available storage by plugging in external USB hard disks (these can't be Raid protected). The other is to share data held on a USB Flash drive. Simply plug the Flash drive into one of the ports, press the blue status LED and the drive contents are copied to a share on the 2big volume, accessible to anyone on the Lan. Very little setup work is required to get the 2big Network appliance up and working. Simply plug it into the network and switch it on, and a default public share is immediately available. By default this is accessible to both Windows and Apple clients (using SMB and AFP file sharing respectively) with FTP and HTTP access similarly available unless otherwise disabled. Additional shares can be created via the web-based management interface and access controlled via an internally managed list of users and user groups. Windows workgroup support comes as standard but we were disappointed to find no domain or Active Directory integration. No special software is required at the client end, although you get a special Ethernet agent to help locate the...
