LaCie bigs up 5big array: Desktop hot storage box gets fatter drives LaCie has upped the capacity of its 5big storage for professional workstation users to 40TB by moving from 6TB to 8TB disk drives. This Seagate subsidiary positions the desktop, 5-slot 5big with dual Thunderbolt 2 connectivity and hardware RAID as capable of supporting 4K video workflows. It has a bandwidth of up to 1,050MB/ …
I was unfortunate enough to own an earlier iteration of the LaCie 5Big and it was an absolute piece of shit. Within a couple of years, 3 of the 5 drives had failed and, if it hadn't been for my "belt and braces" approach of also having backed up to Amazon S3, I'd have lost thousands of irreplaceable photos.
A couple of years ago, I used to work at a college where there was a bit of a turnover in external hard-drives. Without exception, it was always the LaCie ones which ended up dying or becoming unreadable.
Unless things have improved in the interim, I'd be very wary of entrusting my data to anything with a LaCie badge on the front.
Lacie have had some questionable products out in the past.
However, according to the article, it seems as if they've upped the ante: "There is a five-year warranty too, covering drives, enclosure and spare parts"
That's a lot better than some are offering on similar products...
Personally I like enclosures sans disks, I use an Akitio Thunderbolt and a few Taurus (rebadged as "Storiva" here in France) USB3 desktop enclosures and they do the job, but I tend to stuff them with Enterprise class HGST or Seagate spinners, solely for the decent warranty on the disks and shopping around on HDDs makes it a little cheaper than a majority of desktop storage products that come stuffed with disks..
Yeah, it's the drives, obviously. LaCie is clearly making big money from Mac users using Thunderbolt, and taking a seriously big piece of piss by shipping such crappy SGT drives inside. I wish they'd've sold me the unit without drives in it. Looks like they've taken the hint since then, at least by supplying better drives.
I have the first-gen 5Big without RAID, and the Mac Mini is now running Linux (which recognises the PCIE chipset in the enclosure) and doing software RAID6. Works very well. The software stack is all standard, and the machine and drives warm-swappable (Linux doesn't know how to do hot-swap Thunderbolt yet, sadly). It wasn't quite what I'd planned, but OS X's SMB support is seriously fucked up, and Linux is terrific for choice of server software, so it worked out in the end. We got a second (much less powerful) Mini for the Mac-specific stuff, and of course have an encrypted off-site backup.
I bought one of the original 5-big drives and one drive soon failed. I was shocked to find that there's no warranty replacement for individual drives. You send the entire RAID back and they give you an entirely new RAID. That wasn't the solid uptime I was hoping to get from a RAID-5 configuration.
I guess it's still better than Drobo showing all lights green while it's losing everything to I/O errors. (maybe Drobo just fixed this bug)
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