Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
Lately, our favorite NAS manufacturers have been hard at work trying to introduce new and exciting products to the market; LaCie is no exception. With their introduction of the LaCie 5big NAS Pro, they are bringing together an affordable storage solution with a hybrid cloud approach to address the demand for high availability cloud storage along side traditional premise based storage. LaCie claims that the 5big NAS Pro is the “go-to” solution for small business network storage needs… let’s see how they fare.
First, the LaCie 5big NAS Pro (available diskless, 10TB, and 20TB variations) doesn’t throw the kitchen sink at you like some of the other players in this segment. Instead, LaCie has a more focused approach to their product. The 5big NAS Pro doesn’t offer an email server, an SQL server, or even a web server. Instead, they offer an easy to manage file storage utility with the basics.
The 5big doesn’t come to the party completely under dressed; the 5big offers Wuala Hybrid Cloud, Apple Time Machine support, UPnP/DLNA, iTunes Server, Print Server, RSYNC, and a Download Machine (torrent, http, ftp). It supports RAID 0,1,5,5+Spare,6, and SimplyRAID (which supports mixed drives and automatic migration/expansion | similar to Drobo). Support for 802.3ad is present for link aggregation and fail-over, as well as iSCSI support.
The 5big NAS Pro weighs in at just under 17 lbs, measures 173mm x 220 x 196mm, consumes 71W at full load (according to LaCie), sports 4GB of DDR III RAM, and features a Dual-core 2.13GHz Intel® 64-bit Atom™ processor.
