Review of Lacie Bigdisc
In short:
Fail.
A storage device with 3 single point of failure is a no no. Combine it with bad quality and it is a cheat.
Longer:
I cannot recall the exact name of the device but it was a 1TB NAS for about 300€ at the time, 3-4 years ago.
According to the specs it had an open source OS with two ordinary ext(2 or 3) discs. That sounded good for me. Open source OS meant that there was a possibility to tinker with it and knowledge out-in-the-world for discrepancies. Further if the hardware would fail I could always dock the disks into *nix machine and if one disc failed I could always get half the data from the other.
This was Totally wrong.
You see, Lacies support told me the OS was on one of the disks. So if a disk failed, the machine wouldn’t start. The machine was also setup in such a way that if the other disk failed nothing would start either. Finally the setup of the discs was in such a way that if removed from the device the data couldn’t be understood, Ext2/3 or not. To make the construction even worse, as if it wasn’t enough from the start, support told me that the disks and the OS and the machine was setup in the factory so there was no guaranteed way to get anything the disks runing in a new machine either.
I had it replaced with another unit that failed the same way. Incidentally a friend of mine had one too. It failed. He had it replaced. And the replacement failed again.
Having gotten 4 bad Lacie bigdiscs is possible as sheer bad luck. But the construction with 3 single point of failures is not coincidence.