I know plenty of people who choose LaCie drives for their storage needs so it is worth passing along the link on their Biggest S2S 5-Disk RAID tower with SATA-II and PCI card. Features look fairly good, style is decent, and pricing seems attractive.
Well, let’s take a look at the costs for a minute. With 2.5TB for $1790 and 5TB for $4000, they are seemingly competitive to others on the low-end and a bit pricier on the high-end. Of course, depends on whether or not you are going for “name brand” labels. You can find a very similar box and PCI card and add 5TB for less than $3000. With Seagate 500 GB SATA drives going for around $150, does this LaCie box and PCI card really cost $1000? Or $2200 if you use Hitachi 1TB drives (around $360 each)?! The online manual also claims that the S2S RAID will only work with the LaCie PCI card and that “in case of drive failure, do not try to replace the drive yourself, your warranty will become void.“
I think this is what they call “lock-in.” As in, “locked in the trunk and taken for a ride.” But I will retain just a bit of judgement as I haven’t actually used it yet. Perhaps it has some benefits I’m not seeing just yet… and most other “name brand” manufacturers seem to be practicing the same policies. Have you tried to buy a bare-bones box from them lately? They seem to have all disappeared from their online stores…
