SmallNetBuilder

Lacie could care less about their customers, no afp support for OS Lion renders the drive effectively defunct / outdated.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.