LaCie 2big Triple RAID Drive - Review
08 April, 2008
Searching for an affordable freelancer/SOHO backup solution? I think I found one on the weekend. I use JungleDisk for offsite storage of *really* important stuff that I would quite literrally die if I lost, but in this day and age of huge media files, the need for vast amounts of reliable, fast, storage is present. After a previous Maxtor drive started making some horrendous whirring and high pitched electrical whines a replacement needed to be found.
A Saturday morning Google turned up that desktop external HDD's with RAID arrays are now actually affordable, and realistically the only option for a backup drive. Most external drives seem to be configured in RAID0 (data is split across drives effectively doubling capacity, but the upmost worst for reliability). However some drives are available with configurable RAID settings. The LaCie 2big Triple is one such drive, I found one that was within driving distance in downtown Toronto @ Vistek.
So off I went and picked one up. Should you be south of the border it's significantly cheaper on Amazon, I paid just under $CAD469+tax - whereas Amazon it's $US329: LaCie 301254U 1 TB 2big Triple 2-Disk RAID Hard Drive
Unboxed it, set it up. It's a fairly attractive little unit, the aluminium blending in with any respectable SOHO. The funky blue bulge actually is a big red/blue light & one touch backup button. It's a bit more attractive setup than the product images would have you believe. Some designer has put his name to the unit so it looks the part. On the back you have the drive caddies - in theory it's hot swappable (if one drive fails, replace it and the data will be rebuilt to the new drive), with the RAID setting switch, drive status lights, and connectors. I chose the 'Triple' unit meaning triple interface - USB/Firewire400/Firewire800. There's also a NAS variant
should you want skynet hooking up to it and leading a bunch of terminators... woah wrong script :)
I flicked it over to RAID1 and switched it on. A few blinks of various LED's later as the drive reconfigured itself from RAID0 to RAID1 I had a drive ready to be formatted. Use DiskUtility and format/partition it, was then good to go and store files away with peace of mind. And well what can I say - it's just another drive at this point ! I neglected to install any of the packaged software, time machine was quite keen on turning itself on and using the drive but I'm still too cynical and want to control my own backups. A couple of days later having consolidated all of my media and backup files strewn across various drives I feel exceedingly virtuous and safe in the knowledge if one drive goes tits up my data is still safe**
Okay so things aren't quite perfect, the only downside I can see is I hate noise with a passion, I really would like a noiseless drive but that's not going to happen anytime soon. Given what this unit does the noise is a good compromise, it has a tiny little fan hidden away behind the heatsinks, so with the drives idle it's liveable, just a gentle whirr. Accessing it it's a different story - both drives spin up and it crunches away, but given the data's getting written twice to both drives it's unreasonable to expect whisper quietness. The initial dumping of gigs of data to it was quite something but now streaming back mp3's during the day I don't notice it. If you like ultra quiet you may want to store it away in a desk unit or something.
So if you're not backing stuff up, sort it out, now that drives like these are reasonably priced there's no excuse. Also bear in mind always think worst case scenario, and use something like JungleDisk or ExpanDrive to store your files offsite.
** There's some argument out there that prepacked RAID drives are statistically not actually that hot as the drives likely came out of the factory one after the other, in which case if one fails the others not too far behind it. But that's being a little paranoid!
