LaCie 5big Storage Server NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on November 8, 2010 9:26 PM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- LaCie
- 5big
- storage server
- Windows Storage Server
Setting up iSCSI targets and making initiators connect to them is not as easy as setting up SMB shares. However, there is quite a bit of help available on the Internet. We followed two informative links (here and here).
The iSCSI target and a 500 GB virtual disk were created as shown in the video below.
On the testbed, the mapping of the created target was quite straightforward once the appropriate ports were opened up. The video below shows the relevant procedure:
Running the Intel NASPT benchmark and the robocopy tests gave us the following results:
While iSCSI has the advantage of appearing as a fully local disk in the client, we find that its performance in terms of read and write speeds is not as much as what is obtained on SMB shares. However, there is not much difference between the iSCSI and SMB performance numbers.
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Guspaz - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
What's with the crazy partitioning scheme? They've got 102.54GB dedicated to swap...It looks almost like they decided on 34.18GB system partitions, and decided to just throw the rest into swap to use up the space. They could have shrunk that to 20GB, and put four of the partitions in RAID-10, with swap on the system partition. Or they could have had four 17.09GB partitions in RAID-10 for the system, and the remaining 17.09GB partition as swap; do you really need redundancy on the swap partition?
LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Are you sure that's for swap?I'm not sure about Server 2008, but Win7 has a partition meant to aid in recovery of the OS in case it bombs. I believe that partition is about 100MB in size. Perhaps Server 2008R2 has the same?
DoveOfTheSouth - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Somerthing you didn't cover and I think is very important for a small business NAS, is automatic client backup software.Does the LaCie come with any? If it does, how many licences? If not, I think you should mention it - some of the competitors do.
ganeshts - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
I suspect not. LaCie sells a 5big Backup Server for this purpose. I will try to clarify with them (there was no explicit software for backing up clients, though you could obviously backup the server itself using an WSS 2008 option in the server manager)jabber - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - link
For NAS boxes I use Cobian. Its the only solution simple enough for folks to get to grips with and that will easily do backups to or from a NAS box.So many back up apps go mental if you introduce NAS boxes. Why they should in this day and age I have no idea.
Cobian just works.
I think a lot of manufacturers forget this aspect. That many small businesses (1 ro 6 people) dont either have the funds to run a continuous IT support contract or want to have to call in an IT support guy every 5 minutes if they want to change something.
With the economy the way it is, there are a lot of new small firms like this that the IT manufacturers really are not catering to and they are missing a trick.
Cut the IT babble front ends and just let it do the simple stuff in a logical manner.
unblocktheplanet - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link
I use a Mac and I’ve always had good luck with LaCie. I want to stream my movies and music to a networked DVD player as well as using my NAS for backup.I’m evaluating LaCie 5big Network, Synology DS1010+ or Seagate BlackArmor 4-bay NAS 440. My needs are pretty simple.
But then I got to SOFTWARE RAID on LaCie! Sure about that? That would be a deal-breaker for me, the cause of numerous problems on my current external storage.
As I live in Bangkok, I don’t have the ease of returning the unit to the US for service or warranty.
Thanks much.
Hrel - Thursday, January 17, 2013 - link
Can you guys review a few of those new NAS boxes built on ARM processors please?