Lacie's Data Jukebox is Massive and Monolithic

[Chris Gohlke]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/LaCie-eSATA-4big,2108.html' target='_blank'>http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...-4big,2108.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"The 175 MB/s maximum throughput isn&rsquo;t ground-breaking, but it&rsquo;s much faster than any single hard drive, and it persists in RAID 0 or RAID 5 mode. And it&rsquo;s definitely fast enough for a storage or backup solution, as copying data over Gigabit Ethernet will introduce a bottleneck at roughly 105 MB/s. Access times aren&rsquo;t far from what you know from desktop hard drives, and both noise and power consumption are at very acceptable levels at well. The device also comes with excellent backup software and exemplary flexibility, including seven RAID modes. And it has capacity points of 4 TB or 6 TB, which few other desktop storage solutions can provide. Last but not least, it looks good, is well-designed and comes with all the necessary cables. Knowing that USB 3.0 mainstream solutions are still many months away, the investment will even be somewhat future-proof, as it should be possible to replace the hard drives with larger ones in the future.</em><em>"</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1232210040.usr10.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>Shiny, but I certainly think something at this price point should also include a network interface. If I'm going to have to leave the host PC powered up all the time, it would be more cost effective to just put together a normal file server.&nbsp; Otherwise, if you are willing to pay a bit of a premium, this looks like a very easy way to stylishly add massive amounts of storage.</p>

[ptyork]

You could of course just plug it in to one of these: http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/f305/pogoplug-bring-your-own-hd-nas-92097.html

Honestly, even if this had a built-in GbE port, I wouldn't understand the appeal vs. a WHS box, especially one with a 4 drive backplane and eSATA expandability like http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/showthread.php?t=92194

RAID 0 gives you no redundancy and RAID 1+ requires identical drives and is very consumer unfriendly. RAID 5 is cool tech as it offers increased performance with striping along with redundancy. But for NAS, performance is almost always limited by network, and the inflexibility of RAID's hardware limitations makes this just plain unattractive to me. Also, every time I've had a drive failure with RAID 5, I've actually encountered some data corruption, and restoration of the array was more complex than just plugging in a replacement drive.

At first I was ticked off at MS for not making RAID the tech behind WHS, but I've since come around 180 degrees. I might still do a RAID 1 config on my primary desktop, just to make recovery that much quicker (and of course to insure no data loss--even with daily backup you might still lose a few hours). However, for NAS and other external storage, I just think that the add-a-drive-any-drive metaphor works better for redundancy. Drobo is cool in this way, but again, what benefits over WHS? WHS is NAS plus so much more (and for less buckage).

Now, if they'd just release a WHS box with one with one of those cool HAL-9000'esque pulsating orbs...