Michael, don’t do this Michael. I can feel my files slipping away.

Meet HAL9000. That’s what my wife has decided to call our new LaCie NAS. She cites the similarity between the big blue light on the front of the NAS and the vision panels that the famous supercomputer has on-board ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This is a relatively new device to the market and just recently was reviewed by my friends over at Small Net Builder. Tim’s conclusion about matches my experience thus far. It’s not the best performing of its sort, nor is it terribly feature laden, but it is a decent RAID capable NAS. It provides 2.5 TB of raw storage, or in our case 1.86 TB of actual RAID 5  storage based upon 5 x 500 GB SATA-II disks. All for a modest $730 street price.

In my office HAL is displacing an aged PC that was essentially a NAS. It was an XP system based upon an AMD 1800+ with 512 MB RAM, a 4 channel Promise RAID controller with 4 x 300 SATA drives.

Not only is HAL bigger, but he doesn’t need an OS license, nor does he draw 300 watts. HAL draws a modest 43 watts. Perhaps the nicest thing is that HAL, unlike his movie namesake, is essentially silent.

HAL has operational implications for other aspects of the home & office. For example, I’ve setup a share for my music collection and need to work out how to get FreeNAS to mount a remote share so that the SlimNAS can feed the Squeezeboxen.