LaCie 2big network Review

Article Index
LaCie 2big network Review
Specifications
External Appearance
Basic Functionality
Advanced Functionality
Performance
Is The LaCie 2big for me?
Conclusion
All Pages

For a couple of months now we've been evaluating the LaCie 2big network (1TB model) in our labs. The LaCie "iamaKey" impressed us recently, so we took the chance to evaluate one of LaCie's junior NAS devices; we chose the most basic model that supports at least two disks for redundancy. Read on to see how it fared in our torture tests.

The LaCie 2big network is another in the wide range of Network Attached Storage devices. Sporting a bright blue front LED (the large blue object is backlit) and space for two disks, the LaCie 2big network is a competitor to the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo that we reviewed earlier.

LaCie wax quite eloquent about their 2big network:

The LaCie 2big Network offers professional, reliable, central storage for instantly storing, sharing, and backing up from any computer on your network. Manage your home or small office network easily with this full-featured file server. With the 2big Network, you can share files among Windows, Mac, and Linux users, thanks to its SMB and AFP support; or connect remotely through FTP, HTTP and HTTPS file systems. Easily and quickly select your RAID modes with the manual switch on the back of the drive. The hot-swappable disk trays even allow maintenance without affecting your workflow; in RAID 1 mode, a defective disk can be replaced easily without having to turn off the 2big Network. With Windows ADS domain support, there’s no need to recreate existing user and group accounts in your Windows domain, making the 2big Network easy to manage for IT Administrators. Thanks to the Wake-on-LAN feature, the 2big Network can easily be switched back to operating mode from the client side. With the 2big Network, it’s easy to download big files using its integrated torrent server, without even needing your computer to be turned on. You can also play your media files stored in your 2big Network directly on any UPnP AV-compatible device or via a Digital Media Adapter (DMA), such as a PS3 or Xbox. In fact, the 2big Network has been developed to be compatible with any DLNA multimedia device, and also works with iTunes®.

One key difference between the LaCie and the Netgear is the addition of Active Directory support in the LaCie 2big network. This is a big plus for smaller organisations who want more network storage, but without the hassle of managing another set of user accounts and passwords. The LaCie should plug right into our test environment's Active Directory domain and use all the accounts we already have.

Let's take a more detailed look at the specifications of the LaCie 2big network.

The 2big network is a two disk Network Attached Storage device. The two disk bays on the rear can each take a disk up to 2TB in size; that being the largest disk available at the time of writing this review, it's possible that 2TB is not an artificial limit imposed by the LaCie device.

The LaCie 2big network gives us the option of RAID 0 (striping for performance) and RAID 1 (mirroring for data protection). RAID 0 can often provide better performance than RAID 1 because about half of the data is stored on each disk. The flip side to this is that if either of the disks is damaged, or fails, the whole data set is permanently lost.

Naturally, as a network storage device, the 2big network can share files between Windows computers, Macintosh (OSX) and Linux computers - in fact we were hard pressed to think of a platform that can't share files with the 2big network. It can also be the destination for backup of your desktop or notebook computer, and can also back itself up to a USB hard disk for safekeeping.

As we mentioned before, the LaCie 2big network can join an Active Directory domain, and use the users and groups defined in the domain to protect and secure the files on the NAS.

• Back up your NAS to external hard disks with USB ports
• Active Directory Support, Wake-on-LAN
• Stream your multimedia files to UPnP players
• Time Machine® Compatible

The LaCie bigDisk has a very clean, uncluttered look to it, a characteristic of most of the LaCie product range. Prominent at the front is the large bright blue LCD panel, shown unlit in most of the promotional photos. This is the status display for the NAS – when it glows blue, the NAS is running optimally. If a problem occurs, the display turns bright red or flashes red and/or blue; very visible no matter how bright the lights.

At the rear is all the messy stuff; the disk trays, power, network and USB connections, and a strange little white dial with an embossed arrow on it. We’ll get to the white dial in a moment.

The disk trays are somewhat unique. Most hot swappable disk trays employ a lever mechanism that has a twofold purpose. Firstly, it ensures that the connection and disconnection of the disk with the backplane is gentle and controlled; secondly, it provides extra force for the user in connecting and disconnecting a drive.

The LaCie unit on the other hand uses a fixed handle, sculpted into a U shape; the operator simply inserts one finger into the gap and pulls the tray straight out. While undoubtedly quite pleasing from an aesthetic perspective, from a functional perspective it falls short. The removal and insertion of the disks is quite difficult when compared to other enclosures, and the nature of the gap for the operator’s finger is such that small scrapes are a reasonably likely risk. The addition of the locking mechanism is welcome - vertical for remove and insert, horizontal for locked. It won't stop a determined attacker but it does make pulling a disk more of a thought provoker.

The power, network and USB connections all live at the rear of the NAS. There's nothing fancy about them; what is strange is the little dial. The arrow is used as one part of a two part mechanism for configuring the RAID level of the NAS. Turn it to "safe100" and the LaCie is configured for RAID 1 or mirroring, protecting the data from a disk failure. Turn it to "big" instead and it switches to RAID 0 mode which should be both larger and faster. Once the dial is configured, it's onto the web-based management tool to reformat the disks to the desired configuration.

Happily, LaCie's attention to detail means that a small plastic screwdriver is provided in the box to adjust the RAID dial as well as lock and unlock the disk trays.

The LaCie 2big ticks all the boxes for basic NAS functionality.

You get your Windows clients, your OSX clients and your BSD and Linux clients all talking to the same data. Security is handled well with both user and group security available, and the LaCie can also hook into a Microsoft Active Directory environment if you don't want to re-create all your users and groups.

All the administration is carried out using a standard (script-enabled) web browser. Console access (telnet and Secure SHell) are both disabled, so unless the web browser interface supports what you want to do, you're out of luck.

The overall look of the LaCie's web interface is washed out - all the colours are subtle and pastel is the order of the day.

The interface is extremely simple, too - there are just 8 primary options (three of which are for the primary function of the NAS - Users, Groups and Shares). I have the default Users and Groups defined because the NAS is joined to the Active Directory, and I've defined two new shares for Music and Movies.

The small blue dot on the right of each share shows that it is operating normally; the colouring matches the lights for the disks and the NAS itself.

Adding or changing a user is simple - only the username is required (the password can be blanked out by clearing the password checkbox). The Shares tab and the Member of tab allow the administrator to make the new user a member of a group or grant immediate access to a share with a few additional clicks.

Adding or changing a group is even simpler. Again, the Shares tab makes an appearance so that the new group can access a share with two additional clicks.

Adding or changing a share however does not continue the theme - a small amount of information to create or edit, but no access to the two related functions (in this case, granting access to users and groups).

The UI flows very well for common tasks (adding or changing users and groups), with the administrator able to work in the method that makes most sense for the task at hand. A new user can be granted access to a number of shares or placed in a number of groups. It is a small oversight that the Share functionality does not work the same way.

The LaCie 2big also has some advanced functionality, such as participating in a Windows domain, streaming media automatically from the shares on the device, and acting as a low power download server for torrent files (for example, many Linux distributions are distributed today as torrents, as are copyright-infringing files). It can also automatically copy data from a USB thumb drive or backup its own data to an external disk.

The System tab is where the device is configured - its network name, the Windows workgroup and the date and time are set here, along with the network configuration, RAID configuration and any connected external disk drives (format and eject are found here - sharing is automatic). There is a useful Status tab, that also gives access to the (viewable and downloadable) system log, and the maintenance tab for backing up or restoring the system configuration, or uploading patches and new firmware.

Curiously, the LaCie was unable to format the external disk I plugged in - it was previously NTFS and all attempts to format the drive failed with nothing obvious in the log - so if you want to use an older drive with the LaCie, and write to it, you'll need to clean it off first. Reading the NTFS volume worked just fine.

The Multimedia tab is simple; it specifies the folders to be indexed and then the LaCie 2big makes those files available using UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) and DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance).

The Download server (BitTorrent client) can be used to download items directly to the NAS without the need for a hot, noisy PC to be left on. Adding a new torrent to download is a three step process; specify the torrent file on the administration workstation, optionally specify a new name for it, and specify where to save the files. The configuration is simple - you're not expected to be using this as a full time commercial quality client, just a simple client for overnight use.

The LaCie 2big can schedule backups of shares to other shares, providing an easy way to protect data without needing to resort to external devices. Failed backups turn red; but there's no backup log to tell you that everything (or nothing!) was copied - it's all in the one System log accessed from the Status page.

And last but not least; not only does the Web provide the administration console, it also provides direct access to the data.

There was one major let down with the administration UI - and it's glaring enough that we'll call it out here and now. Folders with many sub folders (for example, a music collection) take an inordinately long time to be displayed. It's not the fault of the device, despite it being a low power ARM chip; it's the method of rendering the data (using Javascript within the web browser). Many times when simply selecting a share, the browser would display a warning about the long running script. Small folders (less than 100 or so entries) were fine.

The LaCie is as solid as hewn marble and has the brushed aluminium body of a premium aircraft; but disk performance is also critical in the NAS world. You buy a new storage device with the looks of a Ferrari, you don't expect the performance of a Yugo.

So how well does the LaCie 2big perform?

The tests use the following two data sets:

Small Files:

• 2144 files, in
• 311 directories, totalling
• 136,417,700 bytes (130.10 MB)

Large Files:

• 27 files, in
• 17 directories, totalling
• 783,609,012 bytes (747.30 MB)

The test client was configured as follows:

• Acer R510 Server (Intel 7320 Chipset)
• 2GB DDR-333 ECC RAM (2 x 1GB dual channel)
• 3.0GHz/800MHz Intel Xeon
• HighPoint RocketRAID 2210 PCI-X card in 64 bit, 133MHz slot
• 3 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drives in RAID 5
• Intel Pro/1000 MT Network Connection
• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64

To understand whether the server itself would be a limit, the dataset was copied from one directory on the server to another on the same disk (a stress test). On the small file set the server averaged 26,930,343 bytes per second, or 1541.0 MB per minute. On the large file set, the server was faster at 64,884,409 bytes per second, or 3712.7 MB per minute.

All tests were conducted five times and the average taken after discarding any results that were obviously different from the rest. Tests using FTP were slower than Windows file/print sharing and thus the Windows results are shown here.

First the results with the LaCie 2big configured with the disks in RAID 0:

Source	Target	Data Set	Bytes Per Second	Megabytes Per Minute	%age of PC to PC
PC	NAS	Small Files	1,356,840	77.6	5.0 %
PC	NAS	Large Files	11,226,964	642.4	17.3 %
NAS	PC	Small Files	1,904,002	108.9	7.1 %
NAS	PC	Large Files	15,677,214	897.1	24.2 %

Stress Test

Source	Target	Data Set	Bytes Per Second	Megabytes Per Minute	%age of PC to PC
NAS	NAS	Small Files	841,666	48.2	3.1 %
NAS	NAS	Large Files	6,787,428	388.4	10.5 %

The same tests were then repeated after converting the LaCie to use RAID 1. The tests were not conducted until after the device had reported that the synchronisation of the data was completed.

Source	Target	Data Set	Bytes Per Second	Megabytes Per Minute	%age of PC to PC
PC	NAS	Small Files	1,341,614	76.8	5.0 %
PC	NAS	Large Files	11,255,925	644.1	17.3 %
NAS	PC	Small Files	1,855,103	106.1	6.9 %
NAS	PC	Large Files	15,019,843	859.4	23.1 %

Stress Test

Source	Target	Data Set	Bytes Per Second	Megabytes Per Minute	%age of PC to PC
NAS	NAS	Small Files	880,446	50.4	3.3 %
NAS	NAS	Large Files	6,196,820	354.6	9.6 %

The results are quite disappointing. Despite the 1Gb interface (which tops out at about 120 megabytes per second) the best the LaCie 2big could manage in any test and configuration was just 15MBps - or about 12.5%. In fact, the LaCie would barely be held back if it were only connected to an older 100 Mbps network.

 

Now that we've seen what the LaCie 2big is capable of, we can determine to whom it is most suited.

 

Market Segment	Number of Users	Rating in this Segment	Comments on the Rating
Home Theatre	1 - 5		The LaCie 2big is quiet, the administration interface is simple and it integrates with the XBox360, PS3 and other Hi-Fi equipment. RAID 1 is a good choice for a home theatre environment - no-one wants to reconvert all their movies from DVD if a disk fails, and streaming a movie should be well within the capabilities of the LaCie 2big. Performance might be a problem if you wanted to stream more than one or two movies at a time (to different screens for example).
Home and SOHO Networks	1 - 5		As a small file storage device the 2big is reasonably well suited to a role in a SOHO network. While the raw performance numbers might indicate that the ReadyNAS is slow, saving a 3MB Microsoft Word document to the NAS will take around 3 seconds, which is around the threshold of annoyance for most people.
Small Business	6 - 20		Performance with larger numbers of users is definitely a problem with the 2big, and while easy to manage the LaCie 2big just isn't capable of giving more. The performance is not good enough for more than three or four simultaneous users and with only 2 disks, and only RAID 1, the 2big is left behind on the capacity front as well. Other contenders such as the Intel SS4200 have significantly better performance at a similar price point to the LaCie 2big.

 

The LaCie 2big is a great device for the user and administrator, but it let us down in the performance tests, and even managed to score the lowest of all the NAS units we've tested in the stress test.

The easy configuration and ability to join an Active Directory domain can't hide the LaCie 2big from its ignominy in the performance tests. If performance is your thing, you'll need to look elsewhere. But if you just need something simple and solid, the LaCie might just fit the bill.