LACIE 301525U 10TB 5big Network 2 Professional 5-Bay RAID Server LACIE 9000110U 15TB 5big Network 2 LACIE 301525U 10TB 5big Network 2 Professional 5-Bay RAID Server

Pros: Not a single thing. Stay away from Lacie, you've been warned.

Cons: WARNING: The January 2013 update 2.2.9.1 REMOVES the ability to run this NAS in RAID-10 mode. The update doesn't tell you that at all, only listing "usability improvements and stability enhancements". You can confirm RAID-10 is removed from ALL Lacie products on their FAQ page. Note to Lacie: it is bad business and an affront to your customers to REMOVE critical functionality without proper warning.

Other Thoughts: This was a trial run, and Lacie FAILED critically. We will not be using ANY Lacie products indefinitely. This issue has destroyed your reputation completely, and we will be sure to let others know to stay away from the HORRIBLE products and "support" of LaCie.

Pros: Attractive exterior

Cons: Everything about this NAS is slow and unreliable. I tried to use it as a Time Machine backup server but after only a month the backup DMGs were corrupted. I tried to use it as a regular file server but its performance was incredibly slow. We're talking write speeds of 5MB/s over gig ethernet from the SSD drive of a modern unix machine. The integrated media server is also slow. The software has a ton of really gaping security holes, so don't let it anywhere near the Internet. The first RAID-6 sync took 2+ days. I recently installed a NAS OS update; it blew away the entire config including shares, quotas, user accounts, service settings, everything. It dumped all my data into a "Recovery" folder on a new share. After restoring settings and shares, it took the better part of a day to put the data back where it belongs. The tech support was also slow to respond. The device itself it intermittently noisy.

Other Thoughts: I've had the device for 3 months now. I really regret buying this NAS. I don't feel like my data is even remotely safe on it. I bought based on the features list, but the hardware isn't up to the job. Buying from this big well-known company has so far yielded no benefit over building my own NAS or buying from a less known company.

Pros: Raid 5.Quiet. Runs cool. This is not a beginner device, and their tech support assumes you are a novice at most things. I can't complain, I had problems setting it up initially. I popped in 5 1tb drives and set it to Raid5. It built the array, then 10 hours later found a fault issue with ID 03. I replaced it and let it rebuild and didn't loose any data.

Cons: However, Lacie pushed an update that I think p_ssed a lot of people off. I should have known better than to just update right off the cuff and wait till I checked their boards for complaints. As a result, I lost the web file browser function for more than a week. When I contacted their tech support, I was outraged to find you could not roll the update back like a regular bios flash, so I went without being able to do remote access through web. I hope they don't do that again. I'd sell the thing in a heartbeat to go through that a second time.

Other Thoughts: Since the initial pain the device has worked flawlessly. I won't let it sleep just because I don't trust it enough to do that. I find web browsing sluggish, but it will stream my music collection remotely. I have gotten wiser and have a backup that does incremental. The blue light up front is bright, but you can go to the power config and turn it off. Once you get it up and going, I think you would be happy with it, but it is not for newbies.

Pros: Good capacity, good price

Cons: Listed as supporting AFP, but can't handle ACLs. This makes it useless for use with a Mac.

It's a Unix file system, but you don't get root access to your shares.

Pros: Couldn't tell you

Cons: Doesn't connect to the network, can't use it at all

Other Thoughts: It's supposed to DHCP an IP for itself and then have you browse to configure it. Well I've tried it on 3 different routers that do DHCP and it never pulls an IP. I've done all the steps outlined in the getting started guide, and I've even tried using their diagnostic tools, but none of them find the device. I'm going to have to return it.

Pros: NAS. Raid 5 redundancy. UPNP. In their defense, I have to say "Jon" was very patient, but totally useless.

Cons: I can't tell you how much frustration I am having with this company. If you are totally in Linux of Mac, you will have better luck, but if you are a total win dependent user this is totally ugly.
Bought this "thing" when my external raid5 (Venus T5... don't buy) totally puked the stripe so bad I could not recover 2.8TB of media files. Everything was just dandy at first. Then came the update. Not only did it kill my access to managing my content, tech support said the firmware was not reversible and there was no ETA on a fix. It's been over a week now.
Before they knew it was a firmware problem, they had me back up my entire collection (1.2TB that I re-uploaded fresh from my DVD collection) to an external drive. I went through their procedure to "reset" the device... which was totally ineffective. Then they notified me there were "issues" with the last firmware update and that they were working on a fix.... but they could not give me a time line. When the last firmware was applied, I lost access to all my audio file (56gb). Video files were still accessible. I could add files, but recently when trying to do an incremental back up, I was unable to. Wrote tech support, and they had the audacity to tell me NOW (which is not in their documentation) that incremental was only supported "incremental backup function will only work with external drives that are formatted for EXT3, EXT4, or XFS".

Other Thoughts: I can't tell you how at every turn of this adventure has turned into a total management nightmare. Do NOT purchase this thing if you run anything Microsoft.... it is just totally useless. I am so done with this. I'm sending it back.

Pros: Big and fast. Support answered email within an hour- but was could not solve problem.

Cons: Had for my yearbook- yet when Mac upgraded to Lion, it would not work with it. Contacted Lacie- they basically said - too bad. You don't invest in a NAS to have it not be available within 2 years because of a OS upgrade- you support it. Flas a bios or something. Lacie has really get us down on this one.

Other Thoughts: Avoid companies which do not support their equipment!

Pros: I am very impressed so far with this item, more than I thought I'd be. Cool features -
- instantly recognized by all my computers, both Macs and PCs.
- RAID is configurable. It comes out of the box as RAID 5 but I switched it to RAID 0 and it was easy to do.
- the control panel is easy to figure out and accessible from any computer with a browser. Similar to a router.
- Expandable. There are two esata ports and two USB ports. I have two esata docking stations set up with 1 TB drives which gives me a total of 12 TB. I could do the same with the USB but have them as printer ports
- works great as a printer server
BUT the real test was whether or not I could work off the drives. I own a video production company and I am trying to move away from decentralized storage to centralized storage. Today I was working on an HD project in Adobe Prem using 1280x720 files shot on an EX3 card. And it worked great, as if it were off the local drive. I wasn't expecting it to work frankly.

Cons: Very few cons, but a lot of times the write speed is slow when it should be fast and fast when it should be slow. I might copy a 400m folder over the network to the Lacie and it might take 10 minutes, then I could copy a 2 g file from the same computer over the network and it might take 2 minutes. Not sure what's going on there. Could be something I don't understand.
- although it says it works as an FTP allowing remote access, using dynamic dns if you don't have a static IP, I have had a hard to getting it to work. I think it's my router's fault and not the server though. to be fair.

Other Thoughts: Customer service is good too. When I got it, it said there was only 7.5 TB, and I ordered a 10 TB. I called and got through in 2 minutes. The rep explained about the RAID setup, which I should have figured out, And that was that.

Pros: Easy to set up and configure, 10TB of storage capacity in five bays, RAID 0/1/5/5+spare/6, 2 x Gigabit Ethernet

Cons: you need a gigabit switch to really take advantage of the speed.

Other Thoughts: I use this product for my start-up business primarily to back up all computers and to provide an Internet-accessible repository for upload/download of folders and files. We've been using it for about 8 months now and it seems to be very reliable, only had a couple of downtimes due to power outages. But we've recently purchased an APC UPS for the NAS, so it shouldn't be an issue anymore. I was actually impressed when I plugged the unit to the NAS it has automatically detected the UPS in seconds. No need to install anything. That's pretty cool. Overall, we are very happy with the product. It's a real 10TB workhorse.

Pros: None

Cons: Failed out of box. Two drives failed during setup. I was able to get it back but then I could not turn SMB off, write to any mounts nor could I setup iSCSI.

This unit is a total waste of money