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Lacie has terrible support page on their website. I can not recommend this product. BTW, when one drive is completely dead, the entire device is unusable. You better have either an external SATA data cable to pull your data off, or you need a spare Lacie drive bay lying around and hope it will work. I would say for almost the same money buy a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo.As for my Lacie 2Big Network unit, I will be removing the SATA drives (voiding the useless "Limited" warranty) reformatting them for use in a new Netgear ReadyNAS Duo, and smashing the unit with a sledge hammer. I didn't want complete strangers looking at 98.6Gb of my personal data so I bought a spare 500Gb Lacie drive (Hitachi Deskstar, funny that it wasn't a Seagate) and was up and running again. Then the fan died a week later. I thought that was odd since only one drive failed.
I purchased my Lace 2Big Network (1Tb version, 500Gb in RAID 1) in October 2008. Are you kidding. Once again I was informed that if I wanted Lacie to honor their "Limited" warranty I would have to send the entire unit including the original drives in for RMA. But its not reliable at all. Then you can pull off your data and format / ship the unit back. Ridiculous. The unit is now on it's last legs. It was working fine for the first 3 months then one of the hard drives failed (Drive 0, it was a Seagate).
I don't feel comfortable sending them my data. Do they want the keys to my house also.The Lacie 2Big was great when it worked. When the unit dies I can't access the data so I am TRUSTING that Lacie's employees won't steal any of my 98.6 Gb of songs, photos, documents, Quicken files, etc. AFP worked great (2 Intel iMacs, and a Intel Mac Mini all running OS X 10.5.7). Then the front LED stopped displaying anything.
Their return policy for defective parts is really bad. It's a really nice looking $300+ paper weight. For a company that prides it self on Mac centered / designed products, there is more PC info for troubleshooting. Contacted Lacie and was told that I had to ship the ENTIRE unit back for repair. The web configuration was easy to use and it worked (when it did) well with the 3 Macs I have.
The whole 2Big unit was still functioning at the time. (obviously that was the issue, hardly in need of shipping the entire unit back). With the new 500Gb Lacie drive installed (which I bought at my own expense) the unit worked fine for about 2 months.
Customer service is horrific and could care less about the folks who get stuck with their gear.When I pressed a customer service rep on why it would be difficult for me to send in the whole unit for repair since its my sole point of mass storage for important data (I have no other storage device to hold everything), i was offered this piece of advice:".make sure that important data has duplication on more than one completely separate device"In other words, completely apathetic to my situation and plainly stating that you should not count on our dual drive device to offer you data security. I have had this product for exactly one year, today being the 1 yr mark. This device has now failed twice in one year and I am about to go through the warranty nightmare again.
The "but" - well it is a little noisy as the fans seem to run virtually continuously.Overall - happy with the purchase. I read various reviews of this drive before buying and have found that in general they were accurate. The drive has performed well, is reasonably quick, installed on my home network without issue.
Some folks have complained about noise, but the unit I have only makes a soft whirring noise when the fan is on. Speed isn't blazing when I do a backup, but the built-in RAID gives me great peace of mind. I'm going to buy another one to replace a very noisy Win 2K Dell server in my vacation home. I bought one of these to use as a network file server with Windows machines. Hardly notice it tucked under my desk.I'm giving it only a 4* because of the security issue, but it really doesn't impact my usage. After reading about unsecure FTP, I've disabled it - don't use it anyway. It works like a champ. I haven't run any speed tests, but I can play video files off this "server" just fine with no hiccups.
I'll be ordering the USB version to use with my Airport Extreme as the folks at Apple Care indicated that should be recognized as a target for Time Machine backups. While this product worked well with its own software, because Leopard recognizes it as a network share and not as a device, one cannot use it as a target for Time Machine backups. I was very disappointed.
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