Overall Assessment of the LaCie 5Big Office+
The LaCie 5Big Office+ has been in my home network for several months now. Overall, this is a beautiful piece of hardware. It is heavy, as it is solidly built, and the 5 drive bays and Atom processor make this a powerful NAS unit. It is quiet, and has been running in my living room entertainment center without disturbing us. The large light on the front can be turned down, which is good as it is very bright in the default setting. The styling is striking and it looks very good in my living room.
The Wuala cloud service is fast, and with app support for Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and Linux, you’ll have access to your data wherever you go. It is reasonably priced to boot. A Windows Phone client would be nice, but until Windows Phone gains more traction, this is unlikely.
The media streaming functionality works well. I streamed music, photos and videos from PS3’s, an XBOX, PC’s, Android and iOS tablets, and a Blu-Ray player.
The remote access features worked very well, giving me secure access to my data wherever I was.
This model runs Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials, which is good and bad. The good: it is a familiar system, is very powerful and has plenty of business-facing capabilities, like good Active Directory integration. The bad: it only supports volume sizes of 2TB and smaller in backup mode, so if you configure all five disks as one RAID array, you will need to find another backup solution. In addition, there are some issues with Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials and backups of Windows 8 machines.
Overall, I give this model a 5/5 Gold Award. I will be sorry to see this one go, and when I retire my trusty EX475 this year, this model is on my list to replace it with!
FULL DISCLOSURE NOTICE
LaCie provided the 5Big Office+ that I used in these articles free of charge for evaluation purposes.
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