LaCie intros 5big Network drive array to RAID junkies the world over

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. The only problem with the HAL motif: you really, really don't want your RAID storage device to drone on about how its "mind is going, Dave."

[Via Technabob]

[Drew @ Oct 13th 2008 1:56AM]

What in the world do people use this for?

[Camper @ Oct 13th 2008 2:04AM]

porn

[Matthew C @ Oct 13th 2008 2:14AM]

Raw 1080p HD footage

1TB only holds like 6 hours or something

[beans @ Oct 13th 2008 3:18AM]

correction: a lot of porn.

[Ridgecity @ Oct 13th 2008 3:37AM]

That's a great idea!

"Dave, if you don't finish the presentation before Friday, I'll erase the 7,382 porn movies you have downloaded in the past 8 years, even the ones with the funny donkeys"

[E71 @ Oct 13th 2008 6:32AM]

TV shows you record/download from the net (normally in 720p).

Already set up my own NAS, 7 x 1.5TB Raid 5 Array. \m/

I also don't have that many CDs/DVDs lying around anymore (all turned into ISOs and are now on my NAS).

[Platinum_Skeet @ Oct 13th 2008 2:11PM]

How does Matthew C get high ranked when 1080p footage is a lot smaller?

Example the movie 300 in 1080p ripped is about 4 GB's of data. So really we're looking at around 250 movies in 1080p that can be stored on 1 TB of data...

[Testies, Testies, 1, 2... 3? @ Oct 13th 2008 3:42PM]

I have 5 1TB drives already in a lame esata case, This would be fantastic for my mac! Why oh why will you not sell it driveless? Oh yeah, you're an external hard drive company....

[max andrews @ Oct 13th 2008 5:36PM]

Platinum_skeet, you have no idea what you are talking about. RAW 1080P HD footage is what comes straight off the camera. No H.264 compression or anything. It's about a gig per minute.

[Jim Nichols @ Oct 13th 2008 2:13AM]

After too many failures with various Lacie optical & hard drives I just can't trust their products. I had over a dozen personal & work units fail at various locations. They were great in the mid '90s, but something went wrong when they switched to plastic enclosures. They may be better now, but I'm still gun shy from the late '90s – early 2000s and not willing to risk it.

[Matthew C @ Oct 13th 2008 2:17AM]

Huh - I own an external hardrive and lightscribe burner from them, and their both solid as a rock (heavy aluminum.)

since the power adapter burned out, 5 hours after buying the harddrive (and backingup and deleting 60 gb of data to it) I havent had any problems.

little bit of a panic there til I got the adapter replaced tho.

[Reader @ Oct 13th 2008 2:42AM]

Adapter burnt out? That sounds like a company cutting costs where they think they can get away with it. I don't know anything about LaCie, but I'd have to side with Jim after hearing that.

[Brian! @ Oct 13th 2008 2:52AM]

I have had 3 Lacie raid-type drives fail in the last few years. After the third I can't trust them anymore. In all cases the raid controller failed and in two of the cases we were unable to recover the data. If you buy a non-raid Lacie drive, maybe it runs fine - after all at that point it is just a stylistic case.

So, Matthew, I bet your lightscribe runs fine and probably will run fine for a long time. In that case you just paid money for a Lacie case around someone else's mechanics. As for your hard drive, if you happen to have one of their "big" drives with a raid controller in there - I would seriously not trust that drive with data you don't keep backed up.

Oh, Lacie (or the store that sold me the drive) ended up replacing the drives. I still use them in production for holding transitional video and encodes, but we consider them volatile and back up everything important on them.

Oh, as an alternative, we bought into Netgear's ReadyNAS drive. It is a raid-based network drive with a lot of very cool controls. The thing has a mini-webserver/FTPserver in it. That is very cool as we can access projects if someone is out of the office super easy. It also has some nice auto-archiving features, but I think the remote access is one we use quite a bit. Whatever NAS device you choose, think carefully before going Lacie.

[eric f. @ Oct 13th 2008 9:51AM]

That's exactly what I came here to say...

[toxicpiano @ Oct 13th 2008 2:42AM]

I can't let you do that Dave...

[Reader @ Oct 13th 2008 2:45AM]

Or is it 'I can let you do that Dave'. I mean just look at that friendly deep blue eye.

[Jeff P. @ Oct 13th 2008 2:50AM]

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..."

[SireB @ Oct 13th 2008 3:24AM]

Is it RAID5 or 6?

[diggit @ Oct 13th 2008 3:25AM]

Great. Now if Lacie didn't just have some of the highest failure rates for drives on the market that would be even more terrific.
The only reason this crap sells is because of their deal with Apple - you go to an Apple store and Lacie is the drives they push. Why? Because they look so pretty and matching next to them Macs! Seriously, that's the reason - looks.

[mirakutea @ Oct 13th 2008 3:34AM]

This seems overpriced, is it because of the shiny design?

[feffrey @ Oct 13th 2008 3:58AM]

I wish they would just sell the unit w/o hard drives.
I can put my own in for a lot cheaper.

[Bad Beaver @ Oct 13th 2008 4:07AM]

"Son, one day, all this porn will be yours"
"But dad, it's a LaCie!"

Seriously, if I had that kind of data to juggle on externals, I would use
a) more than one powersupply, therefore
b) more than one enclosure, and
c) none of them made by LaCie.

[batfastad @ Oct 13th 2008 6:37AM]

Wow that's ok pricing, hardware RAID 6. I wonder what the controller is, and the cooling in that thing.

I just built a new NAS to replace our old Lacie Ethernet disk.
The Ethernet disk worked ok (Macs had problems, but they always do) , but it was a 1U unit and got super-hot, and was 4 years old.
Also it managed to get 500GB by striping 2x250GB drives, so when it died it took all our data with it. The data recovery bill was a fair old amount, but cheaper than replacing the whole thing a few years back

Now we've got a nice spacious 5U case, with 2 external 5.25" backplane units (4 hot-swap bays per backplane) connected up to an awesome 3Ware 9690SA RAID card. At the moment we've only got 5x500GB drives in a RAID 6 and another 500GB as a hot-spare, which gives us 1.3TB with 2 bays empty.
But we figure we'll replace the drives in 18 months with 1 or 1.5TB units when we need to increase capacity.

Total cost of building that server, maybe £1400 / $2800.
More expensive, but it runs cool and we built it so can replace parts as and when we need to.

[GhostDoggy @ Oct 13th 2008 8:18AM]

Pretty expensive when you can buy 7200 RPM 1TB drives for $130.

[Das Boot @ Oct 13th 2008 9:09AM]

Has anyone pointed out that this looks like HAL from 2001a space odyssey, except with a blue eye? personally if this thing becomes sentient, it will erase all your donkey porn and then enslave you or kill you. I rather not take a chance.

although, i am looking for something to backup dvd iso's. my dvd collection keeps getting smaller from douchebags that don't return my dvd's so what i want to do is make backups. whats a good reliable External Hard Drive?

[Duh @ Oct 13th 2008 9:23AM]

Uncanny - yes, I noticed the same thing after I read "Neil Poulton applied his HAL 9000-inspired design to the product" in the post...

[Das Boot @ Oct 13th 2008 9:28AM]

@ Duh,

I didn't read that part. I am not very alert right now since i haven't had my peanut butter and crack sandwich this morning. I usually follow it with some coke and engadget.

[Rob @ Oct 13th 2008 9:43AM]

"has anyone point out..."???

Peanut butter or not, you can't simply read before you post?

[dbacon @ Oct 13th 2008 1:38PM]

Why bother with this! If you can build a PC you can build your own NAS solution.

I use and recommend Freenas. For power conservation and performance, use a PCI express lan card, a low power CPU and hard disk drive(s).

It'll out perform any of these boxes, as the hardware can be easily changed to gain or add features as required.

[allaun @ Oct 13th 2008 4:46PM]

I agree, If portability is a issue, just use the ITX form factor. Or If your really a space nut, use the pico-itx form factor. But that seems like a waste. I really don't see a point in buying what is essentially a case with limited use hardware. Unless they release the source code, your stuck with what THEY want you to use.

[kombizz @ Oct 14th 2008 3:30AM]

it seems little bit over priced.

[Lipsig Price @ Oct 18th 2008 1:38AM]

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http://www.lipsigprice.com/diana-lipsig/

[UncleSimon @ Oct 19th 2008 9:33PM]

I have a nearly new 500Gb LaCie network drive which I partitioned. Now I can only access one half and the other half has all of the families digital photos on it.
LaCie's IP configurator crashes whenever I try to do anything with that, so what do I do to access all of my photos? Even the mighty DiskWarrior can't fix a network drive!