LaCie Tries Anew for a Biz Class NAS Hit

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Tim Higgins

The "5big" has traditionally been LaCie’s mainstay small-business NAS, but it hasn’t garnered the interest (or market share) of its Taiwanese-based rivals. With the now-combined forces of Seagate and LaCie, the company is hoping to change the game.

The 5big NAS Pro has new hardware platform, combining a 2.13 GHz dual-core Intel Atom CPU, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM and dual aggregatable Gigabit Ethernet ports. The product photo below also shows two USB 2.0, two USB 3.0 and a VGA port for console video access.

LaCie 5big NAS Pro

LaCie 5big NAS Pro

The new hardware gets new firmware too. NAS OS 3 has LaCie’s Wuala full-encrypted cloud storage completely baked in, so that you get an integrated view of local and cloud storage. The new OS also has a new Simply RAID storage manager built in that lets you mix drive capacities, automatically combining them into a single volume and automatically expanding storage when the time comes to swap up to larger drives. Or you can still use standard RAID 0, 1, 5 and 5+ spare, if you’d rather go old school.

The new 5big does the other things you’d expect a NAS of this class to do, including client backup, Apple Time Machine support, NAS to DAS and NAS to NAS backup, printer sharing and Active Directory support. And if you want it to download Torrents or serve/stream media, it will do that too.

The 5big NAS Pro will come in diskless, 10 TB and 20 TB flavors with the naked version selling for $549 when it hits retailers and e-tailers sometime this quarter.

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