LaCie NAS Ethernet Disk Mini Gigabit

[stockli]

Hey all, just a bit of an informational post...

I saw in the SuperDuper manual that it's generally not a good idea to use NAS devices due to file system limitations. This seems to primarily be because of the file size limitations of the FAT32 file system that seems to be prevalent with NAS devices. However...

I naively purchased a new LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini Gigabit (not the regular 10/100 version, but the 10/100/1000 version), and later found out about the NAS warning with SuperDuper... However, I also noticed that the file system in use by the device is actually XFS, not FAT32, and XFS supports extremely large files. So, I decided to give it a shot! And it worked great! This was excellent news, because we purchased the NAS device for centralized backups between multiple machines, and it was going to be a major bummer if it didn't work.

Bear in mind that I haven't tried restoring files from the drive yet, but backups go without a hitch and it seemed that backups wouldn't work at all if the file size was a problem...

Matt

[dnanian]

Hi, Matt. The warning in the User's Guide is for FAT32-formatted devices, NAS or otherwise, due to filesystem issues with large files. Similarly, most NASen use an old version of AFP that only supports 2GB files.

XFS is fine, though -- and netatalk 3.1 or later works fine, too...

[stockli]

Thanks for the reply! Yeah, it seems that LaCie has gotten it right with this one, so I was just wanting to let everyone know that there does seem to be a workable option for NAS with this device...

Matt