LaCie's 'Big'-brand network storage gets bigger
LaCie has been busy. Just a little while ago, it joined the cloud storage market by acquiring Wuala, and now it's expanding its network storage products.
The company announced Monday a significant upgrade to its "Big"-branded line of products with the LaCie 2Big and LaCie 5Big network-attached storage devices. These two products come with advanced features, comprehensive backup support, and flexible storage expansion.
The LaCie 5Big Network storage device.
(Credit: LaCie)The LaCie 5Big comes with five hard drive bays and offers storage up to 10TB. Its hard drive can be set up in seven different RAID configurations. It also supports Apple's Time Machine, available in Mac OS X 10.5 or later.
In addition, the LaCie 5Big provides improved multimedia server capabilities, allowing users to play multimedia content from the NAS device through a UPnP and DLNA-compatible devices such as a PS3 or Xbox 360. It's also works as an iTunes server, which provides iTunes users access the NAS device from the application interface.
The Lacie 2Big, on the other hand, is a two-bay RAID device that provides up to 4TB of storage. The device supports Windows Active Directory, letting it fit well in businesses that have a centralized domain server. Apart from supporting Time Machine, the LaCie 2Big also ships with client licenses of Genie Backup Manager Pro for Windows and Intego Backup Manager Pro for Mac.
Both the new devices are available now with starting prices of $320 and $800 for the 2TB 2Big and the 2.5TB 5Big, respectively.
Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong. 
