Inside The 4big Quadra

$1299 for slow transfer rates and no NIC... i still dont see much appeal in this type of unit.

Chookman is right, it'd be nice to have a mass storage device as a network drive. For those without eSATA on their boxes just look up an eSATA bracket on Newegg if they aren't using a laptop. It'd be nice to find a bracket with four USB *and* an eSATA connector though. Again there is no such thing as "RAID 10", it's RAID 0+1 or RAID 1+0. Also does this have a three year warranty like the 1TB d2 Quadra? How hot did the unit run? Does the utility report the temperatures? How about SMART status? Without knowing the warranty (and presuming it's not five years) it's a bit of a risk I think without access to SMART.

With USB3 coming out later this year anyone who has to have mobile access most likely would at least want some LAN/wireless support. Plus if you're the type to only run a laptop and don't have eSATA it would be best to just wait until you can get this with USB3 support along with a USB3 capable laptop. Then I don't think transfer rates would be such an issue and the masses would be much better support overall as eSATA is still amazingly difficult to find on entry level systems.

I just don't see the justification, when i can quite easily grab 4 1tb drives, toss them in my comp, raid them up, and accomplish essentially the same thing for 1/3 the cost. Ok, so big whup its not portable, but lets be honest, with the fact that to get decent xfer rates you have to use eSATA, that means you have to ensure that not only do the computers you plan on using it on have eSATA ports, or eSATA add-in cards (additional cost), but you have to ensure they're running SP1 Vista.

Not only that, but $1200 and you could build a NAS box with a hell of a lot more storage and for far less cost.

ROFL @ SMART status, I've been in the disk industry for years and never had a useful bit of information passed on to me from SMART, lol lol lol.
The real issue I see here is that you dont have a network drive for 1300 bucks.
For the same chunk of change you can build a htpc or storage server @ home which is probably more reliable and definitely will outperform this.

Why would I buy this? Huh? $1200 dollars? I built a RAID 5, 2 TB system for under $500 in NewEgg parts to use as a NAS. I don't see the $700 benefit to having it in a subwoofer box. For $1200, this thing should have built in IP, Wireless, bluetooth... Heck for $1200 my dead grandmother should be able to connect to it. (Necro-protocal? LOL... 666.11g)

I find the file transfer graphs most curious.

First, read and write are not labeled. I presume the higher numbers are read.

Second, for raid-5, the transfer rates are about 4 times faster than any other nas reviewed. Either this is an error, or this unit is screaming fast, which was not pointed out in the article. Having personally built my own nas with 6 750gb drives and a dual xeon system, my network read and write speeds are much less than this device, and much higher than any other nas reviewed. I therefore conclude that the measurements are bogus.

It's not a NAS at all, it's just an eSATA enclosure with 4x1.5TB drives. If it were a NAS, then your transfer rates will max out at about 122MB/sec (theoretical) not counting the normal 15% overhead (~105MB/sec total) for a Gigabit connection.

Do you know how to read? I said *for raid-5* the transfer rates are
about 4 times faster. I wasn't speaking about any other transfer rates
except. RAID-FIVE.

He can read, he was mentioning that it was not a NAS, but an external drive, NAS's are meant to be hooked up to a network and have ethernet ports, Comparing NAS transfer speeds to external RAID arrays is like apples and oranges..sure a Raid Array directly connected to a computer will outperform a NAS, most times and it doesn't matter which RAID type it's set to..

FWIW, USB 3.0 may or may not be out this year, but it will start with device support and then carry over to add-in cards and finally, chipsets. Don't expect to actually be using USB 3.0 until 2010.

If you have read the NAS reviews, the fastest NAS did raid 5 writes
around 30mbytes a second. Clearly not a gigabit ethernet limit.
All of the other NAS's reviewed were slower.

Now this device does raid 5 read/write at either 120 or 170 mbytes/second.

Isn't it curious that no NAS device is within a factor of 4 as fast
as this device? Isn't it curious that this thing is about 3 times
faster than my dual xeon raid-5 box, when I have 6 hard drives to
this thing's 4 hard drives. Sure there is some network
overhead, but this thing is so much faster than any NAS that I question
the measurements. I have used bonnie to benchmark my drives local (non-network) performance, and it isn't as fast as this box.

You know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
The article doesn't even mention the processor inside this box.

what about mac OS X? (that other OS)

As stated above, the benchmarks are run using esata -- external, but direct attached, sata.

They will be much higher than any network box will give you...

Maybe I'm just an ignorant old box of rocks but I don't see what is so darn "perfect" about this thing considering I'd have to shell out 1300 bucks for it.

Just a correction request on the first page:
"All that said, some storage products really are different. Here is one that stores up to 4 GB, is extremely stylish, fast and efficient."

I would hate to spend a grand+ on a 4 GB storage...

If you somehow get conned into going to lacie's website because you disagree with stuff from this review, the 4TB version is only $1099 now, but still, too much money.
I also found out some interesting information:
Weight: 15.7 LBS, damn that weighs as much as my computer..
OS Support: OSX/Vista (no support for XP even with 64bit 2TB+)
---Why no mention of Linux hardware support?

---Some of their software doesnt work properly with eSATA - Shortcut Button
No JBOD support, but maybe thats a limitation of the eSATA protocol, I'm not sure. For 1000+ dollars I would expect some more magic.

Its a cool enough product but really shouldnt be priced so high imo.

Ok, let me see... I just put together a Direct Attached Storage box (Sans Digital TR4M-B) that holds 4 SATA II drives, uses 1 eSata cable, came with a 2 port eSata card. It has a backplane, no trays, tooless hotswap. I got 1 x 1TB Seagate drive with it to start. It does RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 5, 5+spare, spanning, and JBOD. Supports WIn 2K, XP, Vista, Server 2K3, Mac, Linux. The price was $270 shipped. If I would have purchased 3 more drives to get to 4TB it would have cost me $330 more, shipped, or $600 total. And it is a nice looking fuller featured setup than this subwoofer box with a light.
I am using this as expansion storage on my Windows Home Server that currently has 3 TB internal, but no more room for drives. If I use 1.5 TB drives for the other 3 slots, I will have 8.5 TB storage online. I can add another Sans Digital with 4 more drives to the same card.
Some posters don't seem to understand the difference between network attached storage adn direct attached storage; or more specifically; using ethernet vs. eSata. Google, do some reading.
For kschoche (posted above) my setup does JBOD on eSata, from what you posted above, the reviewed DAS @ $1200 does not.
As for Tom's hardware, perhaps look around a bit before publishing - lately all I see on here are poorly researched articles. The CES review stated several products were " soon to be released on the market " when they have been out for months. Sheesh.

You've never found smart useful? I love the submit feature of speedfan's smart info, cause with the amount of drives I see dead, it's quite handy to know why they died. And while smart isn't always reliable (see the google hard drive article) or even aware of a problem, it's definetly worth having.

I'm currently running with a raid 5 at home, where one of the drives will sometimes stop working, and break the array - and then work again and it'll rebuild. I don't know which drive it is, cause the controller doesn't care once it's started working again. If I could access smart I'd know if the spindle motor had started way more often than the device been powered - which would indicate a problem with that. Or check on max temp or other stuff that'd reveal a problem.

Point is - smart is worth having.


On another subject - how come hd tach appears to work for you guys? for me it always say 90mb/sec - both on my work pc with raid 1, and in vmware on a virtual drive on the same pc, and on my home pc with a raid 5, and on the old mashine with 3 raptors in raid 0 - always sits at around 90mb/sec according to hd tach. Sandra's benches seem to disagree though.

I'm not sure, but perhaps your own raid isn't working properly?
I'm running 5x500GB WD drives in raid 5 at home. On the onboard (ich9r) software controller. Sandra measured my read speed at an average 180mb/sec. My actual read speed varies a lot between approx 66mb/sec and 260mb/sec, so the average I have isn't a 200mb/sec start speed, dropping to 160mb/sec or so at the end. My speed variation is caused by the chipset according to gigabyte. An offboard controller would see more linear speeds. So even with a 'hampered' raid 5 I'm getting speeds that would be in line with what I'd expect 4 new 1tb drives would do in raid 5 with a hardware controller.



I agree that it is severely overpriced, but apart from the price, I rather like this product. It really just needs a wireless draft n card.

ps. I believe the article stated the lacia box uses some celeron processor for xor'ing.