LaCie 0 TB Diskless Network 2 (2000385)

I have waited 3 months after purchase to write a review because I wanted to be as balanced as possible. I gave the LaCie 3 stars, though, depending on how you wish to use it, it could be 5 stars or 1 star for you.We only own Macs, so I don't know whether anything I write here would be different under Windows. Also, I have served as an IT Manager/Director/VP for many years, and hold several certifications from various vendors, so this is written from the perspective of someone who has set up more than a few servers and RAID arrays over the years.First, the good:1. Easy to set up. There are 5 bays. I put a 2TB hard drive in each bay and set up a RAID 5 array with 4 drives, and one as a spare. Formatted size of the array was 5.5 TB. You simply attach the drives to the caddies and insert the caddies into the unit. When the LaCie boots up, you can access the setup via a web browser. It obtains an IP address from DHCP by default, which was perfect for my home network setup. If you need to set it up some other way, just read the instructions, as there are alternate methods. I don't recall them in detail because I did not need or use them. One caveat: read the instructions carefully regarding boot-up. There is a specific sequence the unit goes thru while booting up, before it is ready to be accessed (signified by flashing lights) and it can take as long as 5-10 minutes to go thru this. Make sure you are patient and wait for the sequence to complete before trying to do anything (i.e., don't turn it off and back on during boot up). The web dashboard is fairly self-explanatory and will walk you thru setting up the drives. You can put in anywhere from 1 to 5 drives, and they don't have to be the same size. The dashboard will give you the setup options available depending on the number and sizes of drives you installed. You get the best, most efficient results and use of drive space when you install more than one drive, all the same size. Once you configure the drives and apply the configuration, walk away and pursue other endeavors. The setup could take a very long time - many hours to a day or so depending on the drives you installed. I left my setup overnight and it was complete in the morning. There is also a choice for "Automatic," which lets the LaCie decide the best drive setup. This choice allows the LaCie to essentially set itself up with no further user intervention required. For my scenario, the automatic choice was identical to what I wanted to do anyway, so I was impressed.2. Easy to use. Once set up, it is easy to use (for the most part - see some exceptions below). There is a lot of flexibility in setting up shares and access. I just used the default, which will be sufficient for most home users. But it has the power to be a file server for a small office as well. I'm just guessing, but I would expect it could serve 15-20 users easily. The LaCie automatically appeared on the Finder sidebar on all our Macs. Clicking on it opened the shares, clicking on them mounted them on the desktop, ready to access. Couldn't be easier. There is also a software program, LaCie Network Assistant, which you can install and which resides on the menu bar. This also allows you to access the shares, as well as enter setup. It is not required, as all its functions are available in some other way, but I do find it convenient to have everything in one location.3. Fast. Copying to and from the LaCie is very fast. We have an Apple AirPort network, with the LaCie plugged in to the AirPort Extreme base station, which is attached via Ethernet to a Time Capsule in another part of the house. Access speeds to the LaCie are at least as fast as the Time Capsule, perhaps faster. I was copying a very large (~1 TB) file set TO the LaCie, so I plugged my Mac into the same AirPort Extreme with an Ethernet cable to speed the copying. It did speed up quite a bit, but this scenario also caused a noticeable lag in access time from other Macs on the network. However, I doubt most people will be copying such a large amount of data very often. Copying the same amount of data FROM the LaCie, however, did not result in any performance degradation to other users.4. Flexible. The LaCie can serve as a AFP, SMB, NFS, FTP, Time Machine, and media server - any or all at the same time! You can also attach external drives by USB and/or eSATA and use these drives to either back up the information on the LaCie (more on that below), or as additional storage.As you can see from the above, depending on your needs, the LaCie might earn 5 stars. However, read on if you wish and I will point out some of the negatives.Now, for the bad:1. While the instructions are pretty good, they are woefully lacking in one area-telling you how long various setup actions may take. For example, when setting up RAID, the instructions simply say it may take "a long time." I don't know about you, but when I read this, I thought, "Oh, a couple of hours. OK, no problem." I did not think A DAY or more! There are other examples where things take far longer than I thought they should have, and LaCie should tell you this. Simply managing user expectations would help ease a lot of potential setup frustration.2. No SSH access, either to the files or the unit itself. You can access files via SFTP, but there is no way to get to the Linux server that powers the LaCie. This is disappointing for power users, because the LaCie does not take advantage of much of the power of Linux, and it could probably do a lot more if we could get to the operating system. A quick Google search shows that some users have proposed ways to hack the LaCie, but I have not tried it.3. There is a great feature which will allow you to back up your backup. You can attach an external drive, either via USB or eSATA, and you can set up the LaCie to automatically (or manually) back up some or all of its files to this external drive. This is particularly useful if you want to keep a copy of your backup off-site in case a real disaster strikes. I attached an external eSATA drive and began a backup of all files on the LaCie (which, at the time, was approx. 1.9 TB). It took 3 1/2 days. Yes, 3 1/2 days to copy less than 2 TB of data via eSATA. Now, eSATA can handle 300 MBps (MegaBytes per second). Why did it take 3 1/2 days to copy 2 terabytes??? A simple calculation would show that it should have taken less than 2 hours.4. Don't try to delete large amounts of data, at least on a Mac. I accidentally copied 750 GB of data to the wrong share. Because there is no way to access the Linux server built in to the LaCie, and simply move the data in a few seconds, the best route seemed to be to recopy the data to the right share and delete it from the wrong one. (Moving it with the Mac would entail copying it from the LaCie to Mac, then back up to the LaCie, unnecessary because I already had the data on the Mac). Copying it to the right share was easy enough, but deleting the wrong copy was a nightmare. It was apparently going to take more than a day. I finally stopped the job and fired up Ubuntu Linux on VirtualBox, connected to the LaCie via NFS, and the deletion just took a few minutes. Now, in all fairness, this has more to do with how the Mac OS handles file deletion versus how Linux does, but it is still a frustration. The LaCie dashboard allows you to browse files and delete and move them, but repeated efforts to use the dashboard continually resulted in apparently locking up the unit and forcing a power reset.5. About that "power reset." The power switch on the back is not a "hard" switch, but rather a "soft" one. This means that it does not physically switch off the power. Rather, it initiates a software shutdown of the unit, which, theoretically, results in it powering itself off in a few minutes. This is great most of the time, as it prevents you from abruptly shutting off the unit and corrupting your data. But when the unit is locked up, this means you have to physically unplug it to shut it down. Then, if this corrupts your data, the LaCie is not of much use until it has rebuilt the RAID array (which, again, can take many, many hours). The instructions make NO mention of this at all; I had to figure it out by trial and error.6. Deleting files can be wonky. Occasionally, I would be unable to delete certain files that had been backed up to the LaCie. It would say I did not have the proper permission, the file was in use, or make some other excuse. The solution to all but the "file in use" problem was to once again access the unit with Ubuntu on VirtualBox, and change the attributes and/or permissions on the files, then delete them. Note that this process is not trivial even for an IT professional; it is likely beyond the ability of the casual user. "File in use" (even though the files clearly were NOT in use) errors required rebooting the LaCie, which solved most but not all occurrences of this problem. Eventually, I had to reformat and start over. Fortunately, this involved an external drive I had connected, so reformatting was less of a problem than had it occurred with the main array, but it was still a pain.As you can see, your mileage may vary with the LaCie 5big Network 2. I suspect that most users will not encounter the problems I did, as they will probably not be that demanding of the LaCie. Knowing what I know today, I will say that I would buy the LaCie 5big Network 2 again. Once you figure out the quirks and get it set up, you can pretty much forget about it and just use it. To me, and to most users, ease of use over the long haul outweighs quirks in the initial setup.

For what is it to have a NAS but lose the ability to run more than 40Gb/second? I have used a lot of great LaCie products over the years, but this one doesn't make the cut. This has beautiful industrial design, intuitive software, and like the 2Big Network 2, can recover from an all-disk failure (or configure from zero) because the firmware is in the unit, not read from disk (Space Max, Network Space, Cloudbox, 5Big NAS Pro do not have firmware in the device itself). The 5Big Network 2 also has some nice features, like easy eSATA and USB expansion.All of that said, there are some issues.First, the unit's Marvell RAID controller is not the tool for the job, and this is the deal-breaker. I ran one of these for several days with 3 Seagate Barracuda 3Tb SATA 3 drives in it (none was >2 months old). The startup synchro (on blank disks) took close to two days. Initial data rate on a gigabit Ethernet network was around 40Mb/second, hardly gigabit speed (this is with an iMac Retina with i7, CAT6 cable, and an ASUS AC68 router). Over the course of a few days, this dropped to under 20Mb/second, and in some cases, was down to 140Kb/second. This seems to have been a break-in related issue with the unit I got, but the initial rate was none too great (and to give you a flavor for that, it took literally 2-3 seconds to get a directory listing for the network shares and close to half an hour to get directory sizes computed - and the sizes did not match what MacOs said about the same data stored locally). In other words, this underperformed USB 2.0 drives - and if your goal was backing up 5Tb of data (one of the only reasons you'd buy a NAS box with five drives), you might as well just buy two 5Tb bare drives and periodically clone via a USB 3.0 adapter. After the fact, I found many review sites had panned this for the same reason - you'll find them too. If I had know about these problems beforehand, I would have just spent the extra $200 for the 5Big NAS Pro, which by all accounts is a professional-grade machine.Second, though not as big an issue, the LaCie "one light does everything" indicator is also getting a little old. Granted, the industrial design is so good that the device wouldn't be noxious sitting out in a mid-century modern house (esp. because the indicator is very HAL9000-like) - but the problem is that you always need the decoder sheet to understand the myriad of steady and flashing blue/red combinations (which are not even the same across LaCie devices). And I have had issues with LaCie devices that are bricked looking like they are actually doing something. It would actually be nice to have some text descriptor in that pretty blue window. The reset sequence is not intuitive, the front light/switch on this unit is not "clicky," and if you have to do a reset, it is hard to tell whether it worked or not.Finally, there is no clear description regarding what happens if you added two new disks to a RAID5 array that already had three. I was able to divine that the unit cannot do anything with a 2Tb drive added to 3 x 3Tb RAID 5 - not even using it as a separate volume. But unlike the Seagate/LaCie SimplyRaid, neither the software nor the documentation makes it clear how you would expand an array without copying everything off to another device, re-synching the new array from zero, and copying it back on (which would take ages, whether by Ethernet or by USB 2.0/eSATA). Maybe it works with just several days of data vulnerability during a re-sych, but the lack of clarity on expansion should raise a lot of red flags.

I wanted to like this thing. It was gorgeous. It was slick. It was compact. And the price was really great.This thing looks awesome, it feels awesome. I even named it R2D2 casue of the big blue eye. I was so excited.The software was simple, almost too simple for someone coming over from the other NAS. I added drives after setting up with two and I just wanted to blow the configuration and start from scratch but I didn't have that option. It insisted on syncing, and it was taking forever to do so.I finally did a hard reset and started a raid 6 with 5 2TB drive. This is half of the capacity it was capable of. It took OVER 2 DAYS TO SYNC ( 2 days 4 hours 44 minutes ). I am glad that I didn't use 4TB drives. If I were to have a drive failure, I am likey to have another one before the new drive rebuilds in let us say, 2weeks maybe?I have seen some slow NAS before but this one makes a sloth look like it is breaking the sound barrier, and with dual core Atoms, the 5big has no excuse.LaCie's online support is less that stellar as well, and in the meantime ( I had PLENTY of time to read ) I read some reviews that called the units reliability into question. One thing I did not like was that by simply turning the thing on with no drives in it, it completely resets the unit and makes your data non-recoverable.I will stick with QNAP. Yes they are twice the price easy. But it preformed the same operation in 9 hours.

Overall, I am very happy with this product, although it was a little challenging to configure. After some basic configuration challenges, I got the drive set in RAID 5 (Automatic) mode, and have started with 3 x 3TB discs and am using for my TimeMachine backup. No problems thus far.