Under the Hood
Lets look at what parts LaCie has chosen to makeup the 2Big Network 2.
Hard Drives
LaCie has chosen the Samsung Spinpoint HD103SI as their drive of choice. These 1tb (2x 500MB platters) drives have a 32MB cache, SATA II interface and run at a power-friendly 5400 rpm. These drives are known for their extremely low power consumption which is perfect in the NAS environment (drawing just 5.6w on read/write according to Samsung). Even though these are 5400 rpm “Green” drives, they are not the fastest we’ve seen (averaging 50MB/s). Like any other drive, we do question the length of life of these drives
Something that we can’t quite get our head around: There are stickers on the screws for each hard drive/tray saying “Warranty Void if removed”. So replacing the HD in a RAID system voids the warranty? Seems almost like they expect you to RMA the drive and tray in order to keep the warranty.
RAM
For our RAM, LaCie has included 2GB of Hynix DDR2 RAM @ 400Mhz which is plenty of RAM for a simple file server and NAS.
CPU/Chipset
Our Chipset is a Marvell Kirkwood 88F6281 with a Sheeva CPU running up to 1.5GHz with 256KB L2 cache. There is no cooler on the CPU keeping it silent. The Chipset supports DDR2 up to 400Mhz and SATA II. This is just the right balance of power and efficiency.
Cooling
Removing the back plate we find our single fan. This Thermo-regulated fan is silent and helps ventilation throughout the case (in the front, out the back). Also, the external design is designed to help dissipate heat. Overkill? Maybe, but it still looks sexy.
