LaCie shows off mobile streaming in new 5big Backup Server

January 12, 2011 By Jeffrey Van Camp

At the Microsoft booth at CES, representatives from LaCie showed us the company's new 5big Backup Server, which stores data for up to 35 computers and can stream data to across the Net, even to mobile phones.

Movies, music, photos and books are becoming digital. The benefits of this are huge. We couldn’t imagine holding a thousand albums in our hands 20 years ago. But with that convenience also comes a cost. Many of our collections are becoming too unweildy to carry around with us. What good are pictures and movies if you can only watch them on your desktop computer? Thankfully, a number of companies are working on ways to fix this problem. LaCie is one of them. At CES, the French company showed us its sleek new 5big Backup Server from the Microsoft booth.

It’s important to have an on-site backup of your computer. The great thing about this is it comes in 5TB and 10TB models and can centrally back up up to 10 PCs and 25 Macs simultaneously, making it great for connected homes and small businesses. In addition, much like some new products from Netgear, it can organize, secure, and stream all your media to a variety of devices, including mobile phones like the one shown below.

To get more technical, it runs on a 64-bit Atom processor, has a 90MB/s transfer rate, has data protection against drive failure, saves multiple redundancies of data, is compatible with Windows Home Server, can restore any PC data that’s lost through a crash, and comes with a three year warranty.

LaCie demoed the product to us and it was pretty impressive. Despite the bad connection at CES (there were 200,000+ devices trying to connect every day) LaCie reps were able to pull up and stream video almost instantly. We didn’t get a chance for an extended demo or to try it out at our offices, but look forward to checking it out soon.

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Reviewer454 at 1:41pm 31st October 2011 CONSUMER WARNING: LaCie—Where the Customer Comes LastIn December of 2010 our design company purchased (2) LaCie 5big Network 2 drives for over $2,000 to begin setup of our onsite/offsite backup and archiving system. We received the drives and completed the setup, only to find that we had terrible performance (100MB/30 minute transfer rate). We opened a support ticket with LaCie in December 2010 was asked to send our device log which they reviewed and informed us that the device log does not show any abnormal activity. We connected the drive directly to our computer and confirmed that we still had the same performance issues. After several trouble-shooting attempts we were told to reset the Network drive (which can ERASE ALL DATA). Now we have entered February 2011 and still have the performance issue, so again we contacted LaCie who informed us that the only solution would be to ship the drive back to them for a replacement drive at a charge of $50. We received the new REFURBISHED DRIVE and completed the setup only to find that transfer to the drive was fine, but retrieving files had a transfer rate of 300MB/6 hours. After several months of dialogue with LaCie we worked with an outside vendor to resolve the performance issues without any help from LaCie. We completed the transfer and setup of our backup system and the drives worked from May 2011 to August 2011.In August 2011, we received the following message from the other LaCie 5big Network 2 drive, “Message from Server: Something wrong with the volume’s CNIB, using temporary CNID DB instead. Check server messages for details.” Now we have had trouble with both LaCie drives. We again opened a support ticket with LaCie and were given instructions to delete the .AppleDB file from the network drive. After completing the provided instructions access to the Shares were broken and we lost access to all of our data. We again contacted LaCie who told us our only option was to send the drive to them for a Recovery at a cost of $1,500 (almost the entire cost of the drives). We were astounded that the only solution was a complete recovery. We went ahead with sending the drive in again and were informed on August 2 that LaCie would assess the drive and contact us with the next steps. After several weeks of contacts by phone and through the support ticket we finally received a message on August 25 that the recovery was about halfway complete. We never discussed costs or other alternatives, they simply went forward with the recovery without contacting us. After several more attempts for an update on September 1 we were informed that the drive had bad sectors and the recovery was going slow. Finally on September 7 we received a message stating that the recovery was complete and if I could review the attached the attached list to confirm all files were recovered. The document we received contained a 42,000 page document with an unorganized list of all recovered files making it IMPOSSIBLE to confirm an accurate recovery. They charged us for the recovery and returned the drive.To date we have 86 hours of unbillable time spent on getting these both of these drives to work within our office environment. We feel that it is important to inform consumers of the EXTREMELY POOR QUALITY PRODUCT and TERRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE we have received from LaCie over the past year. We have moved to another backup product and refuse to use any future LaCie products and would suggest all customers reviewing this product investigate other alternatives.
Anna, CloudBerry Lab at 2:27pm 13th January 2011 If you want to protect your assets on WHS even further and back up your data to Amazon S3 cloud storage, check out CloudBerry Backup add-on for WHS. http://whs.cloudberrylab.com/ . It is one time fee and the rest what you pay for Amazon S3. Besides, there is no proprietary data format and you can access your data using other Amazon s3 tools. Supports all Amazon S3 regions and Reduced Redundancy Storage.