Product Reviews

The 5big Network is intended to protect against the perennial risk of losing precious information, a situation that's painful at best, but at worst could cripple your business. Host to a five-disk Raid array, it supports 25 concurrent users for use in small offices.

Straight out of the box, the array is configured as Raid 5, which can cope with one disk failure. However, it supports a range of other Raid levels - 5 with a spare disk, 6, 6 with a spare disk and Raid 10. Raid 0 is also supported. This takes very little time to set up and provides fast access but no protection if a single disk fails. Set aside several hours for other levels: going back to Raid 5 took around 20 hours.

5big has the hallmarks of a LaCie product with its sturdy and unassuming aluminium case, with a large, combined blue status light and button on the front. Inconjunction with five lights above the disk bays at the rear, there are plenty of flashing alerts to indicate normal operation and, crucially, damage to the array, drive failure and temperature problems - the same information is available in the web-based administration tool.

Replacing a disk takes mere seconds and involves turning a lock using the included tool (or a coin) and then pulling thebay's handle. A replacement 1TB disk will set you back £165 and they're hot swappable so that 5big can be immediately put to work in recovering from the blip in service. Plug the drive into your Ethernet networkand it can take a few minutes to configure itself over DHCP. The included Network Assistant application sits in the menubar and offers the most basic configuration options, such as switching to manual IPv4 configuration, listing available shares and choosing whether to use AFP orSMB to access them.

It only provides limited access to features though, as everything else is handled in aweb browser-based admin tool that conveniently appears in Safari's Bonjour bookmarks, as well as being accessible by name or IP address. More disappointing isthat the menubar icon doesn't reflect thefull

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range of status information that's shown by the on-board lights and by checking the array's condition in the web tool.

Storage can be split into multiple shares, and access through SMB, AFP, FTP and HTTP set individually. Public read or write access can be given, should visitors need to drop off assets, but for day-to-day use, you can use user accounts and groups with succinct forms to keep, say, financial information, and art assets separate and restrict access.

A share with HTTP access is a crude butuseful stand-in for providing files across the whole business, especially where maintaining an intranet isn't worthwhile. However, we experienced a couple of browser timeouts on large files of several hundred megabytes in size when only a couple of users were connected.

On the rear panel is one USB 2 port anda surprising abundance of eSata ports - three in total - to back up a share to an external drive, though we'd gladly have lost one in favour of a FireWire 800 port. One-time, daily, weekly and monthly backups are also scheduled through the admin tool, but they're neither compressed nor encrypted, so you'll also need to consider the security of sensitive files as backup drives can be attached to a computer.

You'll need plenty of additional storage as backups aren't compressed, but it's more important to consider who has accessto the external drive since it's also unencrypted, which isn't ideal for sensitive information. Pressing 5big's only button restores files to a brand new share. LaCie advises merely checking the external drive's activity light before disconnecting it, rather than having a facility to eject it from the corresponding admin tool for safety.

Three licences for Intego Backup Manager Pro are provided. Its step-based approach is friendly, a good characteristic that will encourage you to use it as a matter of course. It can back up, synchronise andeven build a bootable image of a Mac. Additional licences cost a reasonable £19.96 each. The hardware also runs a built-in BitTorrent client to receive large filesonto your network when several colleagues need to work with them.

The web interface could do with a sidebar to offer some guidance on settings, rather than having to keep the PDF manual to hand, but its presentation is otherwise clean and quick to get around.

Sat on the desk next to us during tests, 5big was remarkably quiet and disk activity was only faintly audible. It only takes minutes to get to grips with its web interface, and it's easy to configure and maintain. This makes it ideal for businesses that need to protect a large quantity of files.