LaCie is one of the oldest existing external drive companies that most of us can remember, beginning catering extensively to the Macintosh crowd of the early 1990's with its loaded SCSI drive enclosures. It goes without saying that brand loyalty has always been a big factor in the company's sales, and when many former Mac users transitioned to PC before Apple got its groove back, LaCie transitioned with its customers and now caters to both platforms.

A more recent development is LaCie's move to pursue the market for Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices, like many in the external drive space. NAS devices have increasingly become one of the hot spots in the storage market. The reasons are obvious: There's the ability to host storage on a local network for always-present access -- no need to power up a computer simply to retrieve a file housed on it. Many of these units also support remote access. Another nice feature of Network-Attached Storage is interoperability: These can be used on Windows, Mac OS, OS X, and even Linux simultaneously. Many devices support several sharing protocols at once, as well as FTP or HTTP transfers.

LaCie sent two of its latest NAS devices, one with RAID and one without, in the same 1TB size. Does either offer the quality, features, performance and price to make it a SysOpt value leader? We'll consider the design of each unit separately before our performance analysis.