Price : Too low to display
The LaCie 5big Network 2 offers professional, reliable, central storage for instantly storing, sharing, and backing up from any PC or Mac on your network. It provides up to 10TB of storage capacity in five bays, expandable with its two USB and two eSATA ports. You can also take advantage of its two Ethernet ports to do link aggregation and get twice the performance of single Gigabit Ethernet connection. Recommended for networks of up to 300 users, the 5big Network 2 is the right solution for IT environments looking for high capacity and high transfer speed rates. Thanks to the secure RAID modes, including RAID 5 and RAID 6, the 5big Network 2 enables you to keep data access even if one disk fails. And with room for five disks, the 5big offers more capacity than four-disk solutions in almost every RAID mode. Extra spare disks are available as an option for immediate replacement. Get extra security and increase data portability by backing up your LaCie 5big Network 2on your own scheduleto an external hard drive through its USB and eSATA ports using the built-in copy system. The 5big Network 2 also comes with three client licenses for Genie Backup Manager Pro for Windows and three licenses for Intego Backup Manager Pro for Mac to install on each PC or Mac for client backups to the NAS. You can set up an iSCSI share of your 5big Network 2 and mount it as a local share on your computer in the same way that external hard drives are mounted when connecting to your PC/Mac. With the 5big Network 2’s new widget-like dynamic web interface, administration is easy, convenient and secure. Thanks to the its DHCP and Apipa support, network configuration is fast and automatic. The product integrates easily with existing Windows domains using Active Directory and it allows user, groups, share and quota management.
This review is from : LaCie 5 big Network v.2 5 TB 2 x Gigabit Ethernet RAID Professional 5-Bay Network Attached Storage 301511U
Reliable network storage solution . We have a network of 10 computers in our office and we had to arrange a central file server solution. 5big Network proved to be an easy to use and set up RAID-array: you connect it to the router and then to each of the computers. None of our staff has advanced technical skills and yet we didn't run into any issues during the installation process. The control panel is very straightforward. The unit has been working flawlessly so far.
Reliable network storage solution . We have a network of 10 computers in our office and we had to arrange a central file server solution. 5big Network proved to be an easy to use and set up RAID-array: you connect it to the router and then to each of the computers. None of our staff has advanced technical skills and yet we didn't run into any issues during the installation process. The control panel is very straightforward. The unit has been working flawlessly so far.
LaCie 5 big Network v.2 5 TB 2 x Gigabit Ethernet RAID Professional 5-Bay Network Attached Storage 301511U Reviews
Great server . I've been looking for a quality server for our office to organize centralized backup and file sharing. Considered different options, mostly looked at the servers with hot-swap hard drives, and good reputation. Lacie 5big ticked all the boxes. We've been using it for a year now and it works like a champ. Excellent server solution!
Great server . I've been looking for a quality server for our office to organize centralized backup and file sharing. Considered different options, mostly looked at the servers with hot-swap hard drives, and good reputation. Lacie 5big ticked all the boxes. We've been using it for a year now and it works like a champ. Excellent server solution!
LaCie 5 big Network v.2 5 TB 2 x Gigabit Ethernet RAID Professional 5-Bay Network Attached Storage 301511U Opinions
High quality and great performance . I've been looking for a reliable RAID array. 5big Network 2 seemed to have an excellent price/quality ratio and a great set of features. I also liked 5big for its superb design. The metal enclosure is a great protection for the internal drives and it helps keeping them cool thanks to great thermal conductivity of aluminum. The device has flexible network settings and is very easy to manage. I like it a lot.
High quality and great performance . I've been looking for a reliable RAID array. 5big Network 2 seemed to have an excellent price/quality ratio and a great set of features. I also liked 5big for its superb design. The metal enclosure is a great protection for the internal drives and it helps keeping them cool thanks to great thermal conductivity of aluminum. The device has flexible network settings and is very easy to manage. I like it a lot.
Excellent RAID Array . 5big NAS server is just great. I've been using it for the past 5 months 24/7 and haven't had any issues with the unit. It's a high quality piece that comes at a very good price. Easy to install, easy to use, quiet, fast. Highly recommended!
Great server! . The 5big has an excellent storage capacity and all the features we were looking for in an office file server. The unit is mainly used for data backup and file transfers. This product was suggested to me by an IT specialist working with a friend of mine. The setup was easy. I didn't need to ask for help. The Network Assistant makes is easy to configure the network, the rest can be done from the administrator interface. The device has been working very well with no problems so far.
Great performance! . With 5big I don't have to worry about my archives accumulated throughout the years: everything is backed up and stored in one place. I've setup the unit to work with the Spare mode, which resets the array in case one of the hard drives is down and the spare disk replaces it automatically. Dual LAN interface option allows load balancing, which is great. The unit works well. In a nutshell, this is a perfect piece of technology.
Reliable . I have been using 5big network 2 as a central backup server for almost half a year now and haven't had any problems with it. The unit works like a champ: very fast on the network and surprisingly quiet.
Network Administrators please note: does NOT work in Active Directory with Windows Server 2008 . If you are planning to use this product in a peer-to-peer network you will probably find it useful.
For someone in an academic or corporate environment, please note:
This unit cannot join to a Windows Active Directory network using Server 2008.
I'm a network administrator at a big university (let's just say we came out on the winning end of "the most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heart-rending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football" but I digress). One of our academic units purchased this storage device with the intent of using it to back up web data, publications and video. I was assigned to set it up, and to be fair, this task had a touch of "mission creep." Originally planned as storage for a few computers, the users wondered whether it could be added to the larger campus network so they could use their already established login information. What I found in 2 days of trying was that the LaCie 5 big Network 301525U is better suited for consumer level use.
For a larger environment, it has notable limitations.
The manual states that this product can be added to Windows AD (stated on page 34) but with no mention of its two main caveats
1. NOT COMPATIBLE with WINDOWS SERVER 2008
2. CANNOT JOIN a network with OVER 100 OU's (organizational units, how Windows compartmentalizes network objects such as workstations and users)
To a network administrator, this means that user rights will have to be assigned manually and one cannot employ user names and passwords from an already established network infrastructure. This adds another layer of administration.
I only learned of these limitations at the tail end of 2 days of communication with LaCie technical support. I found them to be responsive, but sometimes they did not seem to thoroughly know their own product. For example, I was told:
"This unit does not support https authentication remotely"
Actually it does support https-there is an icon for secure authentication when you log in through the browser. This is important: if a password were to be "sniffed" you could be giving away the keys to the kingdom, so secure communication is a must. To LaCie's credit, this unit DOES offer this feature.
Perhaps they were referring to something more akin to a remote desktop login and NOT the web interface, which is the only way to access the unit.
So, here is a list of things a network administrator might want to know before purchasing:
YES, it does support NTLMv2 authentication level
YES, setup should be relatively easy even if an organization lacks full time technical staff
YES, the browser interface is pretty easy to use
YES, it DOES SUPPORT HTTPS authentication
Logs are very hard to read, so makes it difficult to track down a problem
Documentation is good to a point, but lacks advanced technical information
NO, it is NOT compatible with Windows Server 2008
NO, it will NOT work in a network with over 100 OU's
If you are a small shop or a home user, this will probably work. If your operation is bigger, look for something with a more flexible native operating system.
In a world of tight budgets, this is a relatively inexpensive network storage solution, despite its limitations.
For someone in an academic or corporate environment, please note:
This unit cannot join to a Windows Active Directory network using Server 2008.
I'm a network administrator at a big university (let's just say we came out on the winning end of "the most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heart-rending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football" but I digress). One of our academic units purchased this storage device with the intent of using it to back up web data, publications and video. I was assigned to set it up, and to be fair, this task had a touch of "mission creep." Originally planned as storage for a few computers, the users wondered whether it could be added to the larger campus network so they could use their already established login information. What I found in 2 days of trying was that the LaCie 5 big Network 301525U is better suited for consumer level use.
For a larger environment, it has notable limitations.
The manual states that this product can be added to Windows AD (stated on page 34) but with no mention of its two main caveats
1. NOT COMPATIBLE with WINDOWS SERVER 2008
2. CANNOT JOIN a network with OVER 100 OU's (organizational units, how Windows compartmentalizes network objects such as workstations and users)
To a network administrator, this means that user rights will have to be assigned manually and one cannot employ user names and passwords from an already established network infrastructure. This adds another layer of administration.
I only learned of these limitations at the tail end of 2 days of communication with LaCie technical support. I found them to be responsive, but sometimes they did not seem to thoroughly know their own product. For example, I was told:
"This unit does not support https authentication remotely"
Actually it does support https-there is an icon for secure authentication when you log in through the browser. This is important: if a password were to be "sniffed" you could be giving away the keys to the kingdom, so secure communication is a must. To LaCie's credit, this unit DOES offer this feature.
Perhaps they were referring to something more akin to a remote desktop login and NOT the web interface, which is the only way to access the unit.
So, here is a list of things a network administrator might want to know before purchasing:
YES, it does support NTLMv2 authentication level
YES, setup should be relatively easy even if an organization lacks full time technical staff
YES, the browser interface is pretty easy to use
YES, it DOES SUPPORT HTTPS authentication
Logs are very hard to read, so makes it difficult to track down a problem
Documentation is good to a point, but lacks advanced technical information
NO, it is NOT compatible with Windows Server 2008
NO, it will NOT work in a network with over 100 OU's
If you are a small shop or a home user, this will probably work. If your operation is bigger, look for something with a more flexible native operating system.
In a world of tight budgets, this is a relatively inexpensive network storage solution, despite its limitations.
So Far So Good . Was easy to set up and administer on the local network. Still working out the FTP setup. Tech support is a bit lacking in that it's an 8 to 5, five days a week deal. Works great with iTunes and the Xbox 360.
Cons Review
Unit looks OK performance was terrible . The case for this LaCie unit is nice. Small unit that you can hide just about anywhere if you're using it at home. If it's in an office, it's going to be in a datacenter or closet, so the looks of it won't matter a lot.
Overall the thing is self-explanatory. Plug in one or two ethernet cables into LAN1 (and LAN2 for failover/load balance bonded NICs). Plug in the power, flip the switch. After that, let it pickup the DHCP address, and then use the LaCie software to access it via a web interface for config.
The Web interface is acceptable. It doesn't really give you the ability to get into things at a nitty-gritty level, which is good and bad (depending on what you want to do). However, there are icons and input fields for everything that most people want to do. It can be slow at times, and it seems that a lot of changes that are made to the network settings force a reboot of the unit (which takes about 3 minutes). For an example, I had the two NICs in failover mode, and I wanted to change the currently active link; I went to the page with this setting, and clicked the new one then clicked save. It applied the setting, and the unit rebooted - without warning (which is another pain point - it reboots on these setting changes without warning or anything. Just WHAM, reboot. After doing it a few times you figure out which ones you can and can't do without reboot, but it's still annoying).
NIC failover works fine, it seems. During a large file transfer I pulled out one of the cat5e cables and the next link picked it up and the transfer didn't seem to stall. PINGs to the unit during this time only dropped one packet.
This, however is where things started to fall apart. I spent a fair amount of time getting myself familiar with the unit, and everything setup exactly how I liked, and began transferring files to it. Upload speeds from various computers on the LAN to the NAS were holding at about 20MB/sec (according to the windows transfer dialog box). I ended up plugging the NAS straight into a server with a crossover cable and the upload speed remained the same. 20MB/sec is roughly 1/5th or so of what I would expect of a RAID5 NAS. If I had to guess, the slow speed is due to inadequate resources within the unit to do the XOR'ing at a high rate of speed.
After everything was uploaded to the unit, I put it into production and did some tests on it with Intel's NAS performance test suite. Upload speeds were reported by it to be 17MB/sec. Yuck. Then, the real kicker happens... the download speed. The suite was reporting download speeds of 90KB/sec. Not MB, not KB! At this point, I once again hook it up via a crossover cable to the server and run the suite again. It peaks at 110KB/sec download. Absolutely terrible.
I immediately pulled the unit from production and put it back into the testbed. I then contacted LaCie about this via their online web ticketing system. My initial ticket was responded to within 6 hours, however, it must've been a generic copy/paste response, as some of the questions asked by the technician I had answered in my original ticket body. I pointed that out, and was told that the only option I had was to send the unit in, at my cost, where they would run a diagnostics test on it to find any hardware issues with it. If they didn't find any, they would return the unit to me, as-is. I had already spent well over $1000 on this unit, and thinking I was going to eat another $25 to ship it to them, and spend a couple of weeks at least without this unit without promise of any kind of resolution was unacceptable to me.
I then tried switching from RAID5 to RAID0. After this operation was done, I transferred file to it, which still transferred up very slowly (I think it was between 20 and 22MB/sec according to windows). As soon as it was done uploading, I began downloading it, and watched as the download speed fell to 60KB/sec. Here I did much more troubleshooting and hair pulling out, to no avail. Factory resets, firmware updates, firmware fallbacks, network changes, RAID changes, share changes all had no effect on performance.
I ended up sending the unit back to the original seller and am awaiting my refund now. As I'm waiting on that refund, I pieced together what it'll cost me to build my own NAS. The only thing that held me back from doing this in the first place was that you can't get as nice of enclosures cheaply when doing this. However, even with a nice Lian-Li case for it all, my total for a 10TB NAS built myself will be about $950! This is with very nice drives, a hardware PERC 6/i RAID card, 2GB of RAM on an AMD based system. Not only is it cheaper now, but it's much more future proof, and I'm not at the mercy of LaCie for firmware updates for bigger drives, etc. (as of this writing, this unit does *not* work with the new 3TB drives for some reason).
All in all, the only real plus I can give this unit is the fact that the enclosure is nice, if you have to have it sitting out on a desk or otherwise viewable to people. If you're just going to hide it away, I *highly* suggest building your own NAS for less money, much better performance, and down-the-line upgrade-ability.
Overall the thing is self-explanatory. Plug in one or two ethernet cables into LAN1 (and LAN2 for failover/load balance bonded NICs). Plug in the power, flip the switch. After that, let it pickup the DHCP address, and then use the LaCie software to access it via a web interface for config.
The Web interface is acceptable. It doesn't really give you the ability to get into things at a nitty-gritty level, which is good and bad (depending on what you want to do). However, there are icons and input fields for everything that most people want to do. It can be slow at times, and it seems that a lot of changes that are made to the network settings force a reboot of the unit (which takes about 3 minutes). For an example, I had the two NICs in failover mode, and I wanted to change the currently active link; I went to the page with this setting, and clicked the new one then clicked save. It applied the setting, and the unit rebooted - without warning (which is another pain point - it reboots on these setting changes without warning or anything. Just WHAM, reboot. After doing it a few times you figure out which ones you can and can't do without reboot, but it's still annoying).
NIC failover works fine, it seems. During a large file transfer I pulled out one of the cat5e cables and the next link picked it up and the transfer didn't seem to stall. PINGs to the unit during this time only dropped one packet.
This, however is where things started to fall apart. I spent a fair amount of time getting myself familiar with the unit, and everything setup exactly how I liked, and began transferring files to it. Upload speeds from various computers on the LAN to the NAS were holding at about 20MB/sec (according to the windows transfer dialog box). I ended up plugging the NAS straight into a server with a crossover cable and the upload speed remained the same. 20MB/sec is roughly 1/5th or so of what I would expect of a RAID5 NAS. If I had to guess, the slow speed is due to inadequate resources within the unit to do the XOR'ing at a high rate of speed.
After everything was uploaded to the unit, I put it into production and did some tests on it with Intel's NAS performance test suite. Upload speeds were reported by it to be 17MB/sec. Yuck. Then, the real kicker happens... the download speed. The suite was reporting download speeds of 90KB/sec. Not MB, not KB! At this point, I once again hook it up via a crossover cable to the server and run the suite again. It peaks at 110KB/sec download. Absolutely terrible.
I immediately pulled the unit from production and put it back into the testbed. I then contacted LaCie about this via their online web ticketing system. My initial ticket was responded to within 6 hours, however, it must've been a generic copy/paste response, as some of the questions asked by the technician I had answered in my original ticket body. I pointed that out, and was told that the only option I had was to send the unit in, at my cost, where they would run a diagnostics test on it to find any hardware issues with it. If they didn't find any, they would return the unit to me, as-is. I had already spent well over $1000 on this unit, and thinking I was going to eat another $25 to ship it to them, and spend a couple of weeks at least without this unit without promise of any kind of resolution was unacceptable to me.
I then tried switching from RAID5 to RAID0. After this operation was done, I transferred file to it, which still transferred up very slowly (I think it was between 20 and 22MB/sec according to windows). As soon as it was done uploading, I began downloading it, and watched as the download speed fell to 60KB/sec. Here I did much more troubleshooting and hair pulling out, to no avail. Factory resets, firmware updates, firmware fallbacks, network changes, RAID changes, share changes all had no effect on performance.
I ended up sending the unit back to the original seller and am awaiting my refund now. As I'm waiting on that refund, I pieced together what it'll cost me to build my own NAS. The only thing that held me back from doing this in the first place was that you can't get as nice of enclosures cheaply when doing this. However, even with a nice Lian-Li case for it all, my total for a 10TB NAS built myself will be about $950! This is with very nice drives, a hardware PERC 6/i RAID card, 2GB of RAM on an AMD based system. Not only is it cheaper now, but it's much more future proof, and I'm not at the mercy of LaCie for firmware updates for bigger drives, etc. (as of this writing, this unit does *not* work with the new 3TB drives for some reason).
All in all, the only real plus I can give this unit is the fact that the enclosure is nice, if you have to have it sitting out on a desk or otherwise viewable to people. If you're just going to hide it away, I *highly* suggest building your own NAS for less money, much better performance, and down-the-line upgrade-ability.
Product Image
Feature LaCie 5 big Network v.2 5 TB 2 x Gigabit Ethernet RAID Professional 5-Bay Network Attached Storage 301511U
- Fast access to your NASPerformance up to 70MB/
- RAID 5 or RAID 6 (hot-swap) modes in case of disk failure
- Failover and load balancing options using two LAN interfaces
- iSCSI target client
- Dynamic DNS remote access
Product Details
EAN : 0093053797867UPC : 093053797867
MPN : 301511U
Brand : LaCie
Weight : 22 pounds
Height : 11 inches
Length : 14 inches
Width : 13 inches
Binding : Personal Computers
Manufacturer : Lacie
Model : 301511U
Publisher : Lacie
Size : 5 TB
SKU : 301511U
Studio : Lacie
Where To Buy
You can buy LaCie 5 big Network v.2 5 TB 2 x Gigabit Ethernet RAID Professional 5-Bay Network Attached Storage 301511U on Amazon . Click here to Read More
