Network disk

We recently installed our network backup device, a Lacie 500GB Network Disk. Installation is a breeze and took only a few minutes. Essentially, connecting it to the network is all that’s necessary to use the device in its default configuration.

The file system supports two formats, FAT and EXT2 (the typical formats used for Windows and Linux, respectively). The web interface allows reformatting the device to either — since our environment is entirely Mac OS/X based I chose to switch from the default FAT format to EXT2.

One disappointing feature of the Lacie drive is that it does not preserve file ownership. While you can configure the device to require authentication using as many username and password combinations as you like, that’s as far as it goes. The authentication is used for device access only, so once connected it appears that every file was originally created by yourself. This is a great configuration for a shared network device that is not supposed to store protected files, but clearly won’t work well if you need it to support proper file ownership. For our purposes, it works — the drive is used chiefly as a large network share and backup device, but this does imply that one user can read someone else’s backup.

Formatted the drive for EXT2 leaves us with about 435MB of usable space. Performance is reasonable, although it does not respond as fast as a our G5 server — this I assume is due to some skimping on the Lacie device’s cache and drive logic board. It becomes surprisingly slow when more than one client performs a lot of I/O operations (such as two simultaneous backups). I wouldn’t recommend the device for a large office requiring a lot of concurrent users but for only a few concurrent connections, it’s fine. This limitation is more evident with write operations than read operations.

Overall, for the investment the device has proven to be a more than worthy network file share, serving our needs for backup and common file directories. In a larger office environment it would probably not be an acceptable solution because of the lack of security. If you are chiefly concerned with shared file storage and are not concerned about performance, it fills the bill well.