This small program identifies the 5bigPro on the network, provides a link to the web-based UI, and helps you map drives. To get started, you install the LaCie Network Assistant. Private shares for users are not automatically created when you create a user, and each user can be granted admin privileges. For private shares, credentials are required, but any user or group can be assigned R/W or Read only rights to any share. For the Public share, no credentials are required. Migration is supported in the SimplyRAID mode only.īy default, two shares are preconfigured: Public and Admin. If you created a SimplyRAID volume with only single drive protection, you’d gain the storage space of another drive, for a total of 8 TB with the 10 TB model. Configured with SimplyRAID, the net available storage after accounting for tolerance is 6 TB. The supplied review unit was a 10 TB model (5drives X 2 TB). The device also supports RAID 1, 5, 5+hot spare, 6, 6+hot spare. Synology also has similar technology ( Synology Hybrid RAID) built into their multi drive NAS products. While this hybrid RAID structure is new to LaCie, it’s not unique. The RAID section of the user manual provides a fairly good description of SimplyRAID. However, with SimplyRAID, you can install disks of different sizes, and can upgrade storage capacity without moving or deleting data. SimplyRAID is a hybrid RAID technology which, like most other RAID levels, provides fault tolerance. Unlike its predecessor, out of the box, the 5bigPro comes configured for SimplyRAID. If you went through all that trouble and wanted to throw another soDIMM into that empty socket you see above, you’d be violating your warranty. But once you get the outer shell off, the board comes out pretty easily. The 5bigPro isn’t designed for the lowest manufacturing cost, since separate power and data cables are used to connect the drive backplane and main board. Yes, you can get a LaCie five-bay NAS apart and the board photo below proves it! The photo isn’t good enough to identify the components, but I’ve done that in Table 1 below. This compares favorably with the 512MB or RAM and 512KB of flash found in the previous version. ![]() LaCie also realized that you need lots of memory for good performance, and has included plenty of RAM- 4 GB-and included 4 MB of flash. The 5bigPro’s hardware platform looks more like the current crop of business / prosumer NASes being based on Intel’s dual-core D2700 Atom. ![]() ![]() LaCie has finally realized that you can’t use a Marvell platform for a RAID5 NAS if you want to play with the big boys. It looks like LaCie traded in the two eSATA expansion ports found on the previous version, the LaCie 5big Network 2 for the pair of USB 3.0 ports. You get two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and a VGA port. The rear panel of the 5bigPro is shown below. There is still a big ol’ lighted blue button on the front that alternates with red when there is a volume failure. It still looks like it was carved out of a large block of aluminum, with a matte finish that you’ll need to work at to get it to show fingerprints. The 5bigPro, as I’ll refer to it in this review, looks like every other five-bay NAS that LaCie has produced. But after a visit with LaCie at Seagate’s (LaCie’s new owners) demo suite at CES and promises that this product was really different, we relented and agreed to review the 5big NAS Pro. So when LaCie once again asked nicely if we would review their latest five-bay NAS, we initially demurred. Performance has been uncompetitive and feature sets have paled beside the lets-make-it-do-everything approach of QNAP, Synology, NETGEAR and others aiming for the same wallets. ![]() In spite of the sleek Designed-by-Neil-Poulton physical design, LaCie NASes have offered little to spark reader interest. That’s not because LaCie has stopped producing new models, but more a reflection of reader interest. It’s been two years since we last reviewed a LaCie NAS.
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