Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"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.

"The LaCie product roof has been raised to 7.5TB with the new 5big Network -- an Active Directory and gigabit Ethernet-friendly array of storage drives that supports several RAID configurations for up to five hot-swappable hard drives. You can try it on in four different sizes -- 2.5TB for $899.99, 5TB for $1,399, or the aforementioned, bar-raising 7.5TB for $1,899. In keeping with his sixteen year relationship with LaCie, the renowned Neil Poulton applied his HAL 9000-inspired design to the product, winning him another Janus de L'industrie award."

Sweet design and while a bit on the pricey side, probably worth it for someone who wants to just be able to plug it in and go. Wonder if they are going to make it in black with a red eye to totally hit the Hal vibe?