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LaCie 5big Network review

By Jim Martin, 27 Apr 2009

Rating:

Price as reviewed:£926

There's no doubt that LaCie makes the coolest looking storage products, but can its boxes measure up for performance, feature and value?

LaCie loves minimalist designs, and the new 5big Network is the sleekest looking NAS we’ve seen to date. A large silver box with a recessed, glowing blue orb on the front, it bears more than a passing resemblance to HAL 9000's all seeing eye.

Designed for small businesses, the 5big aims to take care of your storage and backup needs. It’s available with capacities of 2.5, 5 and 7.5TB, and each one comes with five hot-swappable SATA disks. Out of the box, the disks are configured as a RAID 5, which means it can cope with a single disk failure. You can alternatively choose from a range of other configurations including RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10 and RAID 0. However, while the latter provides the best performance and the largest amount of storage, there’s no protection should a disk fail. If you choose a RAID mode with a spare disk, this will be used automatically when another disk fails. The replacement disk then becomes the spare.

Build quality is up to LaCie’s usual high standard. The aluminium case is sturdy and, even the business end at the rear looks tidy. Each of the five disk trays is lockable and has an LED above it. These can alert you to any problems such as a disk overheating, failing or a corrupt array. Naturally, you can also check the 5big’s status via the web-based management interface. Replacing a disk is an extremely easy task: simply unlock the bay with the supplied tool – or a coin - and pull the handle. A spare 1TB disk for the 5TB model on test costs a steep £157 ex. VAT, but the hot-swap nature means you can slide the new disk in and the 5big will set about rebuilding the array (assuming you’re not using RAID 0). Rebuild times can be 20 to 30 hours for a RAID 5 with 5TB, but you can use the storage during the rebuild process, though performance will inevitably be hit during that time.

There’s a single Gigabit Ethernet port for connection to your network, plus three eSATA ports and a USB 2.0 port. The number of eSATA ports mean it’s simple to add external drives (up to 2TB each) for more storage or backup purposes, but it’s slightly odd not to find any FireWire ports. Backups can be scheduled to run daily, weekly or monthly, but bear in mind that they’re not compressed, so you’ll need to buy big-capacity disks.

Backups aren’t encrypted either, which is a problem for sensitive data as an eSATA drive could be removed and connected to any computer that can read the XFS file system. We found it slightly unsettling that there’s no way to eject an external drive through the management interface – LaCie’s website merely advises users to check the disk’s activity light isn’t flickering before unplugging it. To take a snapshot of a connected drive, you simply push the blue orb on the front. We can’t see many users wanting this feature, though.

Backup software is provided in the form of Genie for Windows 2000, XP and Vista, and Intego for Mac OS X 10.4 onwards. Only three licences are included, with extras costing £20. The software can backup open files, enable previous versions to be restored and can create entire system backups for disaster recovery. It supports compression, encryption and you can choose full, incremental, differential or mirror backup types. Note that Apple’s Time Machine is not supported as this requires a direct-attached HFS+ formatted hard.

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LaCie - Where the customer comes LAST

CONSUMER WARNING: LaCie—Where the Customer Comes Last In December of 2010 our design company purchased (2) LaCie 5big Network 2 drives for over $2,000 to begin setup of our onsite/offsite backup and archiving system. We received the drives and completed the setup, only to find that we had terrible performance (100MB/30 minute transfer rate). We opened a support ticket with LaCie in December 2010 was asked to send our device log which they reviewed and informed us that the device log does not show any abnormal activity. We connected the drive directly to our computer and confirmed that we still had the same performance issues. After several trouble-shooting attempts we were told to reset the Network drive (which can ERASE ALL DATA). Now we have entered February 2011 and still have the performance issue, so again we contacted LaCie who informed us that the only solution would be to ship the drive back to them for a replacement drive at a charge of $50. We received the new REFURBISHED DRIVE and completed the setup only to find that transfer to the drive was fine, but retrieving files had a transfer rate of 300MB/6 hours. After several months of dialogue with LaCie we worked with an outside vendor to resolve the performance issues without any help from LaCie. We completed the transfer and setup of our backup system and the drives worked from May 2011 to August 2011. In August 2011, we received the following message from the other LaCie 5big Network 2 drive, “Message from Server: Something wrong with the volume’s CNIB, using temporary CNID DB instead. Check server messages for details.” Now we have had trouble with both LaCie drives. We again opened a support ticket with LaCie and were given instructions to delete the .AppleDB file from the network drive. After completing the provided instructions access to the Shares were broken and we lost access to all of our data. We again contacted LaCie who told us our only option was to send the drive to them for a Recovery at a cost of $1,500 (almost the entire cost of the drives). We were astounded that the only solution was a complete recovery. We went ahead with sending the drive in again and were informed on August 2 that LaCie would assess the drive and contact us with the next steps. After several weeks of contacts by phone and through the support ticket we finally received a message on August 25 that the recovery was about halfway complete. We never discussed costs or other alternatives, they simply went forward with the recovery without contacting us. After several more attempts for an update on September 1 we were informed that the drive had bad sectors and the recovery was going slow. Finally on September 7 we received a message stating that the recovery was complete and if I could review the attached the attached list to confirm all files were recovered. The document we received contained a 42,000 page document with an unorganized list of all recovered files making it IMPOSSIBLE to confirm an accurate recovery. They charged us for the recovery and returned the drive. To date we have 86 hours of unbillable time spent on getting these both of these drives to work within our office environment. We feel that it is important to inform consumers of the EXTREMELY POOR QUALITY PRODUCT and TERRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE we have received from LaCie over the past year. We have moved to another backup product and refuse to use any future LaCie products and would suggest all customers reviewing this product investigate other alternatives.

By Reviewer454 on Monday Oct 31