Physical examination
Such is the nature of some review samples, our Two Big appears to have done the rounds, somebody having tried to play football with it at some point. Excuse the slight blemishes; they shouldn't be present on the retail product.
The main body of the Two Big is brushed aluminium. It's thick, making it a sturdy piece of hardware. It also has the added benefit of drawing heat away from the hard drives stashed inside of it.
The front is plastic, sprayed the same colour as the metallic casing. Silver sprayed plastic is always dangerous ground, but it looks reasonable. Vents help air move over the hard drives. There are three LEDs, one (green) for power, two (bloo) for independent disk activity.
The rear of the device is quite interesting. Starting at the bottom, there's the power input DIN, next to which is a slot for a laptop style Kensington lock to stop random folk wandering off with your 1TB collection of... whatever it is you collect. Above the power socket is the eSATA connection, which operates at 3Gbps. The grille on the left is for the smallest cooling solution ever seen. It's not as good as on Thecus' N2050, we don't think. However, it still chucks a fair amount of heat out, so serves its purpose. Next to that is a switch for setting RAID modes and a button to commit those changes. Finally there's a power toggle switch.
The front plastic panel simply clips off to reveal the hard disks. Ring pulls allow the drives to be removed, with no screws required whatsoever, which is rather handy.
Inside, you can just about see the SATA connectors for the drives. There isn't much breathing room in there.
Hitachi Deskstars appear to be LaCie's disk of choice, although we can't be sure whether the arrangement is exclusive. Given that Seagate makes 750GB drives and Hitachi doesn't, and that LaCie doesn't offer a 1.5TB version of the Two Big, we suspect this could be the case. Or, it could be a hardware limitation of the RAID controller within Two Big, although we're less inclined to suspect this.
First impressions of the TwoBig are good. It's a sturdy little thing, although the plastic front detracts from that somewhat. Disk installation and removal couldn't be easier
Bundle
In our initial bundle we received two feet for the Two Big, which lift it off the ground slightly, helping airflow. We started out with a PCI-X eSATA card, powered by the Silicon Image 3124. It'll fit in a PCIc slot and function quite happily, but with seriously limited bandwidth (only 133MB/s, which isn't sustainable on a shared bus like PCI anyway and the payload data rate will be less too). We also got a driver CD, along with a quick install guide for the eSATA card.
Above is the PCIe card we were also sent, giving us a bit more bandwidth to play with. The SiI 3132 chip is a native PCIe part, but with just one PCIe lane it has 2.5Gbps of bandwidth, which is less than SATA's 3Gbps. Still, it's better than PCIc, so we have a little more headroom to find the operating limit of the Two Big itself.
TwoBig's power pack can output up to 57W in total It's about the same size as a laptop charger. 12V and 5V power is provided by the power pack, rather than feeding just 12V into the TwoBig, reducing the power circuitry required within the device.
