Lacie 5big Pro 10TB review

The Lacie 5big NAS Pro is a stylish block of silver plastic with a glowing blue button in the middle of it that doubles as a power switch. It has four USB ports at its rear, of which two are USB3, along with two Gigabit Ethernet ports. It also has a VGA port to which you can attach a monitor should you need to use its data recovery or system rescue features.

If you like to keep your NAS on show, the 5big won’t embarrass you

The 5big NAS Pro comes with a software disc that includes Lacie Network Assistant, a utility that helps you locate the device on your local network. The first time you use the 5big NAS Pro, you’ll be asked to update the firmware and set a network name, admin password and time zone. After that, you can log in and configure it for use.

The 5big Pro web interface isn’t as polished as those of many of its rivals, and it doesn’t have a Windows-style user interface, as seen on Synology devices. Instead, every function listed on the Home screen has a screen of its own, and it takes a couple of seconds to load each one. You can’t click the Back button of your web browser to return to the previous screen and there’s no Back button on the web interface. Instead, you must press the Home button and return to the top-level menu.

Not the slickest web interface but it’s easy to use

The various menu screens are at least clearly labelled and it’s incredibly easy to create public and private shared directories. There’s also a general settings screen where you can enable and disable core features such as SMB and FTP file sharing, and gain access to the fiddly iSCSI configuration screen. Annoyingly, you can only set the size of iSCSI targets with a very inaccurate slider. We’d much prefer to type the size.

Other features within the NAS’s web interface include a slightly sluggish file manager, options for configuring different users, groups and privileges and a tool to configure automated backups from your NAS to a local or remote drive, among others. It also has eco management tools that let you set the times when the NAS will be on and active and a clearly designed “download machine” that lets you download content from the internet. Unlike rival NAS devices from Synology and QNAP, you can’t download third-party apps such as IP camera surveillance and control systems or IP telephony servers.

Owners of the Lacie 5big Pro can bene fit from Wuala’s secure cloud storage. 5GB of cloud storage is included free, but you can also make use of a three-month trial that gives you five user accounts and 100GB of cloud storage. The Windows version neatly integrates with Windows Explorer’s right-click menu and creates a shortcut to your cloud-based virtual drive. It’ll also automatically associate the NAS with your account and make its contents accessible via the Wuala app. It’s a really easy way to provide access to your NAS to users anywhere in the world, but it’s not accessible via the web, only the app.

You can also reconfigure the NAS’s RAID settings. The five 2TB Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001-9YN164 hard disks are configured as an 8TB Lacie SimplyRAID volume by default. It’s effectively a RAID 5 configuration, which provides a massive 8TB of space, but it only provides redundancy against the failure of one drive. The 5big Pro provided large file SMB write speeds of 84.5MB/s and read speeds of 106MB/s for an average of 95.3MB/s. In our more challenging small file test, we saw write speeds of 15.8MB/s and read speeds of 28.4MB/s for an average of 22.1MB/s. These are great transfer speeds.

Surprisingly, iSCSI speeds for large files were significantly slower, with a write speed of 42.3MB/s, read of 91.3MB/s and average of 66.8MB/s. Small files fared better in these tests, providing a write speed of 32.7MB/s and read speed of 37.1MB/s, producing an average speed of 34.9MB/s.

We also tested the 5big Pro with the drives configured as part of a RAID6 configuration. This provides only 6TB of usable space but can survive the failure of up to two of the disks in the array. Throughput in our tests using an SMB shared folder was broadly similar, with large files averaging 95.1MB/s and small files 21.5MB/s. iSCSI was much faster, though, providing a large file average speed of 72.6MB/s and small file average of 38.7MB/s.

The 5big is powerful, which is no surprise given its dual core 2.13GHz Intel Atom processor and 4GB of DDR3 memory. This produces fast transfer speeds, but it also means there’s no excuse for the web interface’s sluggishness.

If you just need a fast, high-capacity NAS device without all the extra features that have become almost commonplace, this one’s fairly good value at £685 ex VAT. That works out at just 7p per GB. Because it comes out of the box fully set up and configured, you don’t need to install hard disks or set up shares yourself, which will appeal to businesses that just want their hardware to work. However, the 5big NAS Pro 10TB’s lack of features and clunky web interface will rule out for some, making this a four- rather than a five-star product.