Review Lacie 2Big Quadra
Digital photography and movie enthusiasts always need more hard disk space. With falling per-gigabyte-prices, this is no problem. But considering the failure probability of hard disks, redundancy in the form of RAID is no luxury.
The Lacie 2Big Quadra offers 2 terabyte (TB) of disk space. Users can choose four different setups:
- Big: no RAID, but just the two disks combined into one logical volume. Not fast, not very safe.
- Fast: RAID-0, which is fast and big but has a high failure probability. I don’t recommend this for critical data.
- Safe: RAID-1, which halves the disk space to 1 TB but is fairly fast and offers the best protection for your critical data. Also, when one disk fails, it is easy to replace (“hot swappable”).
- Mixed: RAID-5, which is somewhere in between RAID-1 and RAID-0.
I would recommend RAID-1 or RAID-5 if you plan to store digital photos.
Changing the RAID setting is done by disconnecting the disk and pushing the RAID selection button on the disk itself – you don’t need to change any software setting. However, after having changed RAID mode, you’ll need to reformat the disk by opening computer management in Vista, then initialise the disk and finally format it.
The build quality of the Lacie is very good: sturdy, and with very good heat dissipation, protecting the disks from overheating. Also, it is very easy to access the disks should one fail and you need to change it.
The Lacie can be hooked to your computer via different cables (all in the box):
- eSATA: preferred if your computer supports it, because it is fast and reliable
- Firewire 800
- Firewire 400
- USB 2.0: the slowest of the four, but the most generally used.
The nail on the head: the Lacie 2Big Quadra offers an excellent price/quality ratio if you need RAID-1 or RAID-5, and adds the advantage of high build quality and lots of connection options. The only disadvantage is the fact that Windows users have to reformat the disks before they can work with it, and reformatting can take quite some time (up to 20 hours if you use USB 2.0).
