I administer two debian etch 64bit workstations on a university network. Both are very close to full and a network drive seems a good solution for heaps of space and file sharing. I am considering the LaCie 2Big network and wonder about any experiences people might have had with this or any other similar product.

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10955

Reading the following two pages has made me scared about a LaCie product

http://luon.net/~admar/journal/LaCie...tDiskMini.html
http://www.federated.com/~jim/edmini/

most of what these guys describe is waaayy over my head, but as I see it, they went to hell and back (maybe they enjoyed it? I wouldn't!) because the drive came with poor on-board software that made the network transfer speeds tooo sloooow.

I've not seen any similar articles for 2Big so either it's great (which doesn't correlate with the EthernetDiskMini story) or nobody tested it yet. If anyone has experience with this drive or has good / bad experience with similar products from other manufactures I'd greatly appreciate the benefit of your experience. Should I buy it or is there something better out there?

thanks
the (confused) Flailing Novice

cool looking box, and the fact that it runs linux are great. however that data transfer rate he was able to get even after hacking it seems a bit slow. 5mb/s...

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Anyone know of a better box?

I have a couple of LaCie external Firewire drives.
I get about 30MB/S, which is acceptable for me.

Hi there

I bought 4 Lacie 2big network 1-2 years ago just to realize that this "linux" operating system has no possibility to interact with.

Everything is locked down and you cannot change a drive, altough it SEEMS to be possible, without sending the whole box to the support! If you hack it, it may work for a while (...) but for a serious professional field it is not recommended.

Better buy qnap products .
They have at least professional support and you can decide which drives you will have in it. And a very good software, rich of useful features.

I realized that even the harddrives in the lacie 2big are very cheap an low quality and they are not recommended to be used in a 365/24 operating environment!!

Lacie products (that is my personal opinion which was painfully formed) are cheap crap!!

It looks like they are just NAS drives.

No reason why they should not work with linux (they are probably running linux).

If you plug it into your network you can access its configuration with http://LAN.IP.OF.LACIE (according to page 20 of the PDF manual for the "LaCie 2big Network").

For transferring files to / from it you'll probably need samba / cifs installed.