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LaCie 2big, 4big Quadra drives hop the USB 3.0 bandwagon, give Macs 12TB of speedy storage
LaCie has been sprucing up its smaller drives to handle a new crop of Macs that support USB 3.0. It's now turn for the big boys to play. Updated versions of the 2big Quadra and 4big Quadra (not yet shown here) use the faster port to reach the potential of their high-capacity RAID arrays, peaking at either 210MB/s for the dual-drive 2big and 245MB/s for its quad-drive cousin. We're not seeing a fundamental shakeup of the design apart from the higher speeds, although that's not necessarily a problem given the FireWire 800 to catch legacy users and hot-swappable bays for future upgrades. Video editors and other storage mavens should just prepare themselves to pony up. The upgraded Quadra models will start at respective $499 (4TB) and $1,099 (8TB) prices when they ship in October, and they're only poised to get more expensive when LaCie sets the costs for the higher-end 6TB and 12TB models.
Synology DS1511+ does the 3TB-per-drive dance, backs up most of your neighborhood
Once one network attached storage manufacturer upgraded to 3TB hard drives, it was only a matter of time before the rest followed suit, and this time it's Synology's turn with the DiskStation DS1511+. In case you haven't done the math already, this particular unit can store up to 15 terabytes of your juiciest secrets across five 3TB hot-swappable drives, and its 1.8GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of memory handles a RAID 5 array capable of speeding that data across a local area network at up to 197 MB / sec read speeds and 165 MB / sec writes. If that capacity isn't enough to house your plan for world domination and monitor all the IP cameras in your underground volcano lair, the unit can scale up to 45TB with a couple of secondary expansion units, each with five more 3TB drives of their own. Yours for roughly $900 -- sans storage -- wherever NAS are sold. PR after the break.
Homemade 16TB NAS dwarfs the competition with insane build quality (video)
From the man that brought you the OS Xbox Pro and the Cinematograph HD comes... a cockpit canopy filled with hard drives? Not quite. Meet the Black Dwarf, a custom network-attached-storage device from the mind of video editor Will Urbina, packing 16TB of RAID 5 magnetic media and a 1.66GHz Atom N270 CPU into a completely hand-built Lexan, aluminum and steel enclosure. Urbina says the Dwarf writes at 88MB per second and reads at a fantastic 266MB per second, making the shuttlecraft-shaped 12.7TB array nearly as speedy as an SSD but with massive capacity and some redundancy to boot. As usual, the DIY guru shot a professional time-lapse video of his entire build process, and this one's not to be missed -- it showcases some pretty spiffy camerawork as well as the man's welding skills. See sparks fly after the break.
Three WD VelociRaptors get setup in RAID 5 array, testing ensues
Western Digital's hasty VelociRaptor already got reviewed by its lonesome, but for those thinking of getting a RAID system into their rig, HotHardware has taken a trio of 'em, setup a RAID 5 array and put the drives through their collaborative paces. The configuration was made possible thanks to an Areca PCIe X8 hardware RAID card, and the results were rather impressive -- to no one's surprise, might we add. Across the entire volume, performance was generally linear save for a few small valleys along the way, burst speed was 598MB/sec and average read speed was 209.4MB/sec, which pretty much blew the doors off of everything that came before it. Number lovers, there's more where this came from in the read link below.
Buffalo spices up spacious NAS line
We can always count on Buffalo to keep the updates rolling for their NAS products, and thanks to cheap and expansive hard drives, we're liking where things are going. Their new 2TB TeraStation holds four drives -- we'll leave the math to you here -- and sports Gigabit Ethernet and RAID 5 compatibility. The LinkStation merely houses a single drive, up to 750GB in capacity, but keeps the Gigabit connectivity for high-speed fun. Both devices also support DLNA to keep the media flowing, but we're not so sure on price or availability. Luckily these are the "consumer" line, so the damage shouldn't be too great.
