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back to article LaCie d2 Network

For anyone technically minded and with time to spare, there are numerous network-attached storage (NAS) solutions available at low cost. However, there is a fast-growing market for the ‘appliance’ Nas that you plug in, switch on and use straight away on your home or small office network with a minimum of configuring. The d2 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Decent price?

    I'm not sure how the notion that these are at a decent price was arrived at. Particularly the larger capacities. It doesn't cost any more to make a NAS box that a 1.5T drive can be fitted in than a 500G drive.

    In fact, for anyone who simply MUST have the 1.5T version of this, I recommend getting the

    500 gig version and a bare 1.5T drive. A few minutes work swapping over and you've saved a few quid and have a spare 500 gig drive. If you don't want it, you can always bother fleabay with it.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Hmmm...

    £150 for 500gig, non redundant... No thanks.

    Given the price of a 500gig drive (not much), you'd have thought they could have made room for an extra drive in the case and supported mirroring, even if the extra drive was an optional extra.

    500gig drive £40

    Icybox IB-NAS902 enclosure £60

    There you go, same functionality (bar the torrent server) if you don't mind screwing in your own hard drive for 2/3 the price. plus of course the saving goes up if pick a bigger drive.

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  3. Morten Bjoernsvik
    Thumb Down

    Performance?

    From my previous experience with Lacie NAS, the performance of the built in server was terrible.

    It was only 100MBit/s but I was unable to get more than1-2 MBytes/s write and twice for read.

    When the number of files grow above 5000 performance fell further, probably due to the terrible ext2 filesystem which was installed by default. Pretty unusable.

    How is the perfomance now, can it manage 40MBytes/s write when gigabit connected?

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  4. Rob Daglish
    FAIL

    Yes, but how often does it need rebooted?

    Yes, but if it's anything like the 1TB Network Space that I acquired (and thank god I didn't actually pay for it..) it probably needs rebooted from cold every 20 minutes or so. It's a right pain, so much so that it stands a real good chance of becoming a top quality door-stop just as soon as I make sure that there isn't any data on it I haven't got backed up somewhere else. Maybe a little less emphasis on "design" and a little more on "function" wouldnt go amiss next time guys.

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  5. Carl Williams
    Stop

    @Both previous AC's

    Swapping the drive in this NAS is not for the faint hearted and with the lack of a Lacie community and specialist recovery tools it is not a 5 minute job. Linkstations with their following and backup make this easy but not for Lacie, well not when I tried anyway.

    The Icy-box mentioned is only 10/100 and will have a deathly slow CPU in it, the Lacie will out perform this markedly even on a 100meg swtich, the icy-box is cheap for a reason.

    How do I know this? Well I have have several generics NAS' (much like the icybox), 2 Lacie Etherdisk Minis and 4 different linkstations, The generics were sold on after I realised they were slow and not stable, the Lacie sold on when I realised I was stuck with the disk size, all linkstation were upgraded with bigger disks and I still run two upgraded ones now.

    Sorry guys appliance NAS' are a minefield.

    The only things I can see this failing on is the lack of expandability (can't attach a USB disk directly to back it up) and the lack of a built in print server. The price will drop rapidly in this competitive market.

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  6. Trygve

    @AC

    Icybox IB-NAS902 - only has 100Mb ethernet (hence dog slow) and I don't think it has ADS import capability either. Good bit of kit, but definitely on the cheap and cheerful side. I deeply regret not having got something with GigE.

    The Icybox IB-NAS4210 is probably a better bet, but that's about £80 and if you want media server capability you have to cough up some more after the TwonkyMedia trial runs out.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    LAN output?

    I bought a WD MyBook World edition a couple of years ago. It too has a Gigabit Ethernet port - fat lot of good it is though! The processor is so feeble, it only outputs at best around 40Mb/s.

    How does the processor / output of this thing compare? does it get anywhere close to gigabit speed?

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  8. careless

    As per last comment

    What species of Numpty puts company data on a single drive?

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B000JWCD3Q/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

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  9. Anomalous Cowherd Silver badge

    Readynas NVX

    Just bought one of these last week and so far I'm pretty pleased. It's not cheap, but it does everything I need: AFP, NFS, iSCSI, DAAP for iTunes and RAID (some sort of Readynas-specific RAID-5 variant that auto-expands when larger disks are put in, which was what finally convinced me not to build a ZFS based NAS myself)

    If you're in the market for this consider the RNDX4250 rather than one of its more expensive big brothers - it's not listed on the readynas website, but it comes with 2 x 500GB disks and you can then add your own disks - definitely cheaper.

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  10. Jim Westrich
    Thumb Down

    No

    I doubt they really fixed this but like others commenting above I had lots of problems with an earlier generation of Lacie NAS. The thing would have all sorts of trouble if you left it on for any length of time. It would also interfere with network traffic even when it was not being used (but connected obviously).

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  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MIght try it

    I would consider getting one as I have found LaCie to be more reliable in travel drives(WD in particular).

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  12. Timbo99
    FAIL

    Not a chance

    After my experience with the LaCie Ethernet Disk mini - Home Edition - and LaCie's woeful support - I won't be touching one of their products again in a rush.

    Pity, the case looks so damn nice.

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  13. ninan
    Linux

    Jailbreaking LaCie (Big) Ethernet Disk

    I´ve got hands on the 2TB version (aka Big disk) and documented the steps necessary to jailbreak the running Linux (makes up a nice ARM powered server) in my blog at http://nerdicism.com/2009/07/jailbreaking-lacie-big-ethernet-disk-look-mummy-no-skrewdrivers/

    Happy hacking...

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