Introduction

Networked Storage products come in a variety of configurations, storage capacities and features. They range from the simple single-drive devices such as Buffalo’s LinkStation Live and LinksStation Pro, to multi-drive BYOD products like the DLink DNS-323, up to the rack-mountable business class Linksys NSS4000.

Consumer-based products tend to focus on features such as media servers, web servers, and in the case of the Synology DS-207, download clients for Bit torrent, HTTP and FTP. NASes targeted at businesses tend to have fewer of the consumer features, but instead focus on data availability and fault tolerance.

The LaCie Ethernet Disk RAID (EDR), available in both 1TB and 2TB configurations, is a four drive NAS that has many features that are likely to appeal to business users. In addition to RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 5 found on many NASes, the EDR also supports RAID 5 + Spare as well as RAID 10.

For those not familiar with RAID 10, it’s similar to RAID 1. In a four-drive RAID 10 configuration, two disks mirror the other two disks. In either configuration, as with the RAID 5 + Spare configuration, the available space on the RAID is 50% of the total “raw” storage capacity. In this four drive configuration, the RAID 5 configuration yields 75% usable space while still providing fault tolerance.

Rather than a rack mount form factor, the EDR is designed to be a desktop NAS. It measures 6.3 X 8.42 X 9.6 inches and weighs in at 12 lbs. Four SATA drives are mounted horizontally above the circuit board and power supply. On the front panel, there’s a power switch and seven LED indicators. There’s an LED for power, system status and disk status as well as a link and activity indicator for each of the EDR’s two gigabit Ethernet ports. In addition, each SATA drive, mounted in a hot-swappable tray, has an activity indicator.

The Ethernet Disk RAID is not a BYOD device—it arrives fully populated with disks. Our 1TB test unit had four 250GB Hitachi Deskstar drives (HDT 725025VLA380). Tray-mounted 250 and 500 GB spare drives (Figure 1) are available from LaCie. These drives must be used to replace failed drives or your warranty will be voided.

Figure 1: Spare drive for Lacie Ethernet Disk RAID

The rear panel of the EDR (Figure 2) has two gigabit Ethernet ports and two USB 2.0 ports for adding external drives or printers. The NAS has two separate fans—one for power supply and one for cooling the drives/CPU. The larger fan, approximately 3.5” (diameter), is temperature-controlled.

Figure 2: LaCie Ethernet Disk RAID rear view

The EDR has over-temperature protection and will shut down if the CPU reaches or exceeds 85 C (185 F) or if any of the disks reach or exceed 55 C (131 F). There’s also a reset button as well as security slot for securing the NAS with anotebook cable lock.

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