It used to be that Network Attached Storage devices were simple beasts. You get your device, you drop in your storage, connect it up and you’re done. The odd bug fix download, sure, but the feature set you bought was the feature set you kept. Not any more. We’re now in the era of NAS devices running their own, bespoke operating systems. Following in the footsteps of Synology and Q-NAP in releasing OS updates recently is LaCie, whose NAS OS 2.0 is now available to download and install on the company’s Network 2 range.
We’ve praised the company’s widget based user experience in reviews over the last 12 months, and v2.0 looks set to enhance ownership further with easy access and configuration of major features such as RAID storage management and backup. New in this release is improve storage management features. According to the company, the storage array can be expanded from a single disk to a multiple disk RAID mode such as RAID 1 or RAID 5. Additionally the system can migrate from one RAID mode to another automatically or manually without endangering the data.
Also new is enhanced client backup, now centrally managed from the NAS server. PC to NAS backups can be full or incremental depending on user needs, and data can be easily backed up from the NAS to a USB or other externally connected hard disk for off site storage.
OS X 10.7 Lion users will be relieved to see support enabled in the new update, whilst SMB, AFP, Time Machine, iSCSI target, NFS and Windows domain integration are all still supported. As a final touch, power management has been improved with a scheduler to switch the device on and off at user-determined times.
NAS OS 2.0 for LaCie’s Network 2 range is available now to download from www.lacie.com/NASOS2.
