LaCie Announces its Next-Generation NAS Server for Consumers and Enterprises

International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2013 brought a good news for both consumers and enterprises when LaCie showcased its 5Big NAS Pro at the big meet. This high-end NAS server is an upgrade to its predecessor 5Big Network 2.

The LaCie’s 5Big NAS Pro is backed by a dual-core 2.13GHz Intel 64-bit Atom processor and 4GB RAM. This 5-bay server is designed to better fit the high storage needs of organizations (up to 20GB) and provide data rates as high as 200MBps through its two Gigabit Ethernet ports.

One of its many exciting features is the new SimplyRAID mode. ‘SimplyRAID’ allows you to automatically configure the server to run a specific RAID mode depending on the number of disks currently used. This feature will be a saving grace for novices who do not know how to set the 5-bay storage device in a RAID array that best meets their performance and security requirements. In addition, you can employ disks of different sizes and replace them anytime without needing to rebuild your RAID. The 5big NAS Pro also features other commonly-used RAID modes, such as RAID 5, RAID 1, and RAID 0.

The convenient design of this NAS server makes it easy to inset or pull out drives. Further, you can lock the drive tray through a coin. Each bay’s tray can easily fit a standard SATA 3.5-inch (desktop) hard drive (with storage up to 4TB). The two network ports can be combined to achieve high data rates. The server is also equipped with two USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports to allow for more data storage when needed.

The new server comes with an USB thumb-drive that can be used to reinstall the server’s OS (i.e. NAS OS 3) when a failure strikes. NAS OS 3 supports an online storage service ‘Wuala’ that lets you move all the server data to the cloud. This means that you can always stay connected through the Internet even if you are away from the main network. Encryption is applied to your data before moving it to the cloud. The new 5big NAS Pro will be commercially available within a few weeks in two diskless versions of 10 TB and 20 TB.