Digital Home Thoughts: Lacie's Data Jukebox is Massive and Monolithic

"The 175 MB/s maximum throughput isn’t ground-breaking, but it’s much faster than any single hard drive, and it persists in RAID 0 or RAID 5 mode. And it’s definitely fast enough for a storage or backup solution, as copying data over Gigabit Ethernet will introduce a bottleneck at roughly 105 MB/s. Access times aren’t far from what you know from desktop hard drives, and both noise and power consumption are at very acceptable levels at well. The device also comes with excellent backup software and exemplary flexibility, including seven RAID modes. And it has capacity points of 4 TB or 6 TB, which few other desktop storage solutions can provide. Last but not least, it looks good, is well-designed and comes with all the necessary cables. Knowing that USB 3.0 mainstream solutions are still many months away, the investment will even be somewhat future-proof, as it should be possible to replace the hard drives with larger ones in the future."

Shiny, but I certainly think something at this price point should also include a network interface. If I'm going to have to leave the host PC powered up all the time, it would be more cost effective to just put together a normal file server. Otherwise, if you are willing to pay a bit of a premium, this looks like a very easy way to stylishly add massive amounts of storage.