LaCie 5big Network Reviewed

[Spiken]

LaCie 5big Network Reviewed

Thanks for the review, Tim.
Does this nas is external brick powered like the "power connector" seems to say?

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the review, Tim.
Does this nas is external brick powered like the "power connector" seems to say?

Yes. External power brick 100 - 240 VAC.

 

[lhl]

Tim, I saw in your review you mentioned there was no power-saving mode available, but in the specs on their site, there's the following:

Standby mode: 10W; idle mode: 40W; seek mode: 44W****
Triple Power Management : “Auto” for standby mode, “ON” for normal operation, and “OFF”

See: http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11118

Just curious if this was something added in a firmware update or if this actually *isn't* an option? Or that the standby makes the device inaccessible?

(edit to clarify standby/power-saving)

 

[thiggins]

There is no idle drive power down or scheduled startup, shutdown. The "idle" mode is more like when you put a PC to sleep manually.

 

[lhl]

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification. (I just started reading through your reviews - they've been quite useful, especially the power consumption and noise levels. I like that all these Orion-based NAS's are pretty low-power, but a bit frustrated by their crap performance.)

 

[Jay]

Thanks for all the info. Do you know if you can replace or upgrade failed drives with non Lacie supplied ones. It would really bite if, 3yrs after buying the unit, a drive fails and i have to track down a now rare 5Big 500GB proprietary coded/formated drive.

 

[Abhishek]

Piece of junk

The LaCie technical support was completely useless. The person I spoke to really should not be called an engineer. I would have probably got a better response from an automated answering service.
Eventually, I had to remove the harddrives from the LaCie 5Big unit, connect them to one of my own linux desktops, then use mdadm to rebuild the raid and xfs_repair to fix the corrupted file system. That allowed me to access my data and I was able to recover it all.
I have resolved to never purchase any LaCie products again and advise all my associate and collaborators here at UCLA to never ever trust LaCie products again. I've had three other LaCie hard drives (the Neil Poulton, Sam Hecht and even the quadra designs) fail on me but I assumed that I just had some bad luck. However, the incompetence of the engineers at LaCie and LaCie's refusal to take any responsibility or even offer any useful advice on the matter convinced me that this company makes substandard products and cannot be trusted with my data.
The interface on for the 5Big unit is clunky, unreliable and tedious to use.

 

[Kevin McMurtrie]

LaCie FAIL

Thanks for all the info. Do you know if you can replace or upgrade failed drives with non Lacie supplied ones. It would really bite if, 3yrs after buying the unit, a drive fails and i have to track down a now rare 5Big 500GB proprietary coded/formated drive.

That's exactly what happens. My 5big came full of 1.5T Seagate drives that are known to fail prematurely. Not only did LaCie not warn me, but they can't send replacement drives. They need the whole 5big shipped back for warranty service. This completely defies all the advantages of a RAID. The 5big is one drive that's 5x as likely to fail as a single drive.

 

[Unregistered]

I decided to leave the LACIE world too...

I have a 5big2 4TB Raid-5 box and I´m quitting with it...
It is slow, writes like 1999 laptop drive at 22 mb/s and reads at 30-35 mb/s average. On top of this, it has a reputation of being unreliable.

True storage solutions should work, not just look good.