I hereby withdraw any previously implied recommendation or endorsement of LaCie products. Warning: endless rant below. Spoiler Well, the warranty of my LaCie storage server, about which I have posted here occasionally, expired two months ago. One month ago, one of the five SATA ports quit working. Three days ago, a second quit, this time with an overload that burned off part of the power connector on the hard drive. I pulled the thing apart, it being out of warranty, to see what the board was on the inside. It's a MS-96D8. All I can find online is a few Chinese pages that make no sense. It's a custom job to fit inside the box with a surface-mounted Atom processor, custom power connector and the five SATAs. If I had a spare, I could replace it and get the machine running again in about five minutes. I contacted LaCie to find out how much a replacement board will cost. This is when I found the true danger of LaCie products. - If a device is out of warranty, they will not touch it. - The internal parts are custom, and you can't buy them anywhere. - As a courtesy, I can get a discounted price on a new replacement device (this model is no longer manufactured). For what I paid for this device, such an attitude from the company is completely unacceptable. If they would let me send it for repair at some cost, -or- sell me the part I need, that would be acceptable. But to completely orphan it without warning is another thing. Imagine if the car you bought two years ago could not be taken to any repair shop, because the car manufacturer refuses to sell parts to the repair shops, and their engine is so different than other cars that no other parts manufacturers make parts for it either! So, my next project is building a new storage server using standard, easily available parts. At least they used standard SATA drives inside that box instead of some custom interface, so I can re-use those.
It's no mystery why LaCie has these policies and practices - replace "LaCie" in your post with "Apple, Inc." and it reads the same.
I get your story all too well. Few years back I needed something for my ever growing storage needs. I bumped into so many people reccomending me all kinds of these ready made NAS boxes that eventually I caved in and got some Thecus brand piece of equipment. It never did do all the things that were promised and I had problems mainly accessing it through windows 7 (to which I had just upgraded all my systems). After months I managed to get some confessions out of the support people after which I managed to 'sell back' the unit to my dealer at original purchase price. Since then I swore to never by proprietary crap again. Just build your own low power box and configure it whichever way you want it. That's the best solution. You can't probably make it as small as these designer units, but you can get nearly as low power which is more important when you're dealing with something that is runnin 24/7