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Introduction
| At a Glance | |
|---|---|
| Product | LaCie 5big Network (301354U) |
| Summary | 5 SATA Drive RAID 5/10 NAS primarily focused on file serving and backup |
| Pros | • Gigabit LAN w/ jumbo frames • Smooth RAID failure recovery • Quiet • Three eSATA ports for storage expansion |
| Cons | • Low performance compared to other five-drive NASes • No media or print servers • Unhelpful logging, email alerts • No idle power down |
Take the basic features of LaCie's 2big Network NAS, expand the number of drives from 2 to 5, add RAID 5, 6 and 10 (each with spare drive auto-failover), put it in a case that could be mistaken for a small sub-woofer and you have the 5big Network.
Craig Ellison's 2big Network review and the 5big's slideshow do a good job of describing the 5big's feature set. So this review will primarily focus on performance and just hit the highlights and differences of the 5big.
Product Tour
The 5big has LaCie's trademark monolithic look and perhaps takes the "clean" design look a bit too far. The case is heavy-duty aluminum, but eschews the heatsink fin look of the 2big for a smooth look. There are no visible fasteners and I have to admit that I couldn't figure out how to get it open for internal photos!
The front has a big button similar in size and function to that on the 2big, which blinks patterns of blue and red colors to convey status. It also serves to start the automatic copying of an inserted USB key to a folder. Under normal conditions, the button glows blue and doesn't blink to indicate network or drive activity. For that, you have to turn to the rear drive status lights.
Figure 1 shows the rear panel features. Link speed and activity LEDs are built into the single 10/100/1000 Ethernet port, which supports jumbo frames with 4000 and 9000 byte fixed settings.
Figure 1: Rear view of the 5big
There is only one USB 2.0 port, but three eSATA ports that are usable only for attaching external storage—the 5big lacks UPS support and does not include a print server. External drives formatted with FAT32, NTFS, HFS+, EXT3, REISERFS or XFS can be mounted by the 5big. But any external drive used to back up the 5big must be formatted in XFS, which is the filesystem used by the internal drives.
Drives are locked into position using a screwdriver, coin or plastic "2-in-1 RAID mode change and drive lock tool" that LaCie throws in. The drive carriers don't have locking levers, so these locks are the only thing that holds the drives seated into their backplane connectors.
The three-position power switch (on/off/auto) functions the same as on the 2big. If the on/auto/off power switch on the 5big is set to "On", the Shut Down button in the web admin interface will restart the 2big, not shut it down. If set to "Auto", the system will enter Standby mode.
Due to the multiple RAID modes supported by the 5big, it doesn't use the physical mode change switch used on the 2big. Instead, you configure the RAID mode using the web admin interface. Figure 2 shows the RAID modes that the 5big supports.
Figure 2: RAID modes
Internal Details
As I noted above, I couldn't figure out how to get the case open. But pulling out all the drives gave me enough of a look at the main board that is mounted below the drives to be able to determine the components used.
Not surprisingly due to its relatively low performance among five-drive NASes, the 5big uses a Marvell 88F5182 "Orion" processor (@ 500 MHz). Memory is on the low side, too at 128 MB or RAM and 4 MB of flash. Due to the large number of drives there is also a Marvell 88SX6081 8-port SATA II, 3 Gbps PCI-X host controller.
The single 10/100/1000 Ethernet port is provided by a Marvell 88E1118, which supports 4K and 9K jumbo frames. The 2.5 TB model that LaCie provided for review came with five Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 500GB drives (HDP725050GLA360 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s).
A single 4.5" fan is mounted above the drives and pulls air in the top perforated opening and exhausts it down over the drives and main board and out the perforated bottom of the case. Drive and fan noise is low and power draw was measured at 43 W. There are no power save features.
User reviews
View all user reviewsAverage user rating from: 12 user(s)
Lacie s**ks
Lacie could care less about their customers, no afp support for OS Lion renders the drive effectively defunct / outdated. Less than 2 years old and not a cheap purchase, they have lost a customer.
rubbish
bit torrent doesn't work
securing shares doesn't work
dnla doesn't work
time machine (now) doesn't work
lacie support doesn't work
the case is sturdy and cleverly shaped so it won't take a standard mini itx motherboard.
you can't even use it like a dumb drive and daisy chain it t something else.
an incredible waste of money and it's only twelve months old.
not fit for purpose and a law suite spring to mind.
Nothing but problems
I bought the 5big almost a year ago, and Lacie has since replaced it with the updated version (which has 2 1gigabit lan ports with bonding, but with the poor disk performance you can forget about this feature). Both have had the same problems. It takes 30-60 minutes to power up or down. You can forget about drive performance. The first unit I had would hang in the middle of any type of file transfer, ftp, smb (windows). The new unit does the same thing. I started an ftp transfer of about 500gb 2 days ago, and assumed it would be done in the morning. It had only completed about 75% of the transfer, then disconnected from the network I have tried everything and it will not reconnect. I turned the power of about 45 minutes ago, and it's still on, it looks like I'm going to have to pull the power cable again and go through the agonizingly slow reboot process.
Which brings up the next interesting point - anytime you power down, when you power back up it will usually say at least one disk is bad and the raid array is rebuilding which takes 24 hours. Of course, it will only say that if you can get to the web interface, which is unavailable 90% of the time.
But, it does come in the shape of a pretty cube with an enigmatic blue eye (which is a button that as far as I can gather, does nothing).
If I could return this POS i would. It's actually so useless, I'm buying a new computer case, power supply, processor, memory, etc, and a decent raid card and harvesting the 1TB drives from the 5big piece of crap.
Garbage
This is not a NAS.
Performances are ridiculous, features very limited compared with competitors, Torrent client unusable (hangs), using http(s) protocol you can upload files till 2GB but cannot downloads them if bigger than 55MB!!! It 's impossible to use it in a domain, etc., etc.
Tech support is maddeningly slow and inconclusive.
Big features but rubbish performance
The review titled "impressive new version" must have been written by a Lacie employee or something because this NAS is certainly not fast!
The specs for the Lacie 5Big look good on paper - but that's about all it has going for it. Lacie are positioning it as a high performance storage server - but it's not. Transfer rates are mediocre.
When I tried to back up using the Intego Backup software for the first time, my mac froze and when I restarted by mac I found that I could not connect to it. I contacted Lacie and I took the unit into them. After 2 days they could not diagnose what was actually causing the issue, but they said it was a faulty unit. They migrated my data to a brand new 5Big...and now when I tried to transfer files over to it, my mac froze again and now cannot reconnect to the 5Big. And once again I am in a situation where I can no longer connect to it.
Related Items:
LaCie Refreshes d2, 2big and 5big NASesNew To The Charts: LaCie 5big Network
New To The Charts: LaCie 5big Network 2
Slideshow: LaCie 5big Network
LaCie Announces New Windows Server NASes
