Hands On: LaCie Home Server

I met up with LaCie this afternoon for a briefing on their forthcoming Windows Home Server model. The company shared a few more details on the hardware and planned add-ins that weren’t revealed in yesterday’s press release.

Lacie’s home server is based on Intel’s new Pine Trail platform and comes with the new Atom processor and 1GB Ram. As you can see from the shots above, the unit’s five hard drive bays are located in the rear of the chassis, leaving the front of the box clean. The large button in the front panel also acts as the drive indicator. Networking comes courtesy of a Gigabit Ethernet port, four USB ports and an eSATA port, which is port multiplier aware. Upgraders will be disappointed to learn that Lacie’s custom motherboard has the processor embedded, so it’s not upgradable.

LaCie highlighted that the server is definitely positioned for small business rather than the home, and as such, they’ll ship with all five drive bays populated. The size of the drives may vary depending on the model purchased, but 5 x 500GB is likely to be the base spec.

In terms of add-ins, Lacie will ship TwonkyMedia Server on the product as well as their Wuala cloud storage service (likely to be fully configured as a Windows Home Server add-in). This will provide 5GB of online storage for free – if you want more storage, a very neat model applies. Wuala is a distributed cloud storage service, which means that your data is encrypted and stored on multiple machines all over the world owned by other Wuala users. Agree to donate part of your home server’s storage for others to back up their data, and you’ll receive twice that amount on other people’s machines for your own off-site backup. All of your data is securely encrypted and stored, so you can be sure that no prying eyes will get to it.

The Lacie Home Server is scheduled to ship world wide in February/March – pricing is yet to be announced. We’ll have a full hands on review here on WGS in the next couple of months.

More Info: Lacie Home Server Press Release