Review: LaCie 2big NAS

For testing the transfer speed of the NAS, we transfer a 46.6GB Blu-Ray ISO (Avatar) from the the workstation to the NAS and back five times.  We pipe the transfer speeds during the benchmark to a .csv file for charting.  For more on our Avatar Benchmark please see our Benchmarking application: COD Benchmarking Utility

New for the 2big NAS benchmarking we are introducing our C.O.D. MP3 benchmark.  We use the same method for the avatar test and create two hundred MP3’s and specific file sizes for repeatable results.  The files are copied from the workstation to the NAS and back 5 times.  We pipe the transfer speeds during the benchmark to a .csv file for charting.

For further benchmarking, we test each NAS using Intel’s NAS Performance Toolkit to rate 2 key areas of NAS performance.  We measure File Copy speeds to and from the NAS and the Directory Copy speeds to and from the NAS.

We conduct our power consumption using a Kill A Watt EZ P4460 Power Meter and measurements are taken every minute for 10 minutes then averaged for the results.

Bench System:

• Motherboard: Gigabyte 880GA-UD3H
• Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 965
• Memory: 2x2GB Patriot Sector 5 PC3-12800
• Hard Drive: Crucial M4 SSD 128GB
• Chassis: Lian Li PC-6 (click to read our review)
• Power Supply: BFG LS-450
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Our C.O.D. Benchmarking utility revealed that the 2big NAS can transfer a large file (46.6GB) to the NAS at 40.40MB/s in RAID 1 (mirroring) and a slightly faster 45.06MB/s in RAID 0 (striping).  Read speeds were far closer and much faster with RAID 1 coming in at 92.43MB/s and RAID 0 at 91.58MB/s.