The obvious choice here would be to buy two 1TB drives and save about $500.00.

Now you have the ability to lose up to twice as much data as before when this drive prematurely dies!

LaCie's drives are pretty, but don't put your only copy of anything important on them. Enough of my clients had bad experiences with them that I recommend other products and strongly discourage the purchase of LaCie stuff.

I speak from personal experience. If you can't restrain yourself from buying a LaCie drive, then you'd better buy two of them and keep one backed up on the other. For me, it was less than a year after buying their 1T drive that I heard the dreaded ka-TINK ka-TINK ka-TINK of a drive failure.

And that is exactly where LaCie has gone... down hill.

Massive storage has been replaced with massive stupidity, as this company insists on using the worst drives they can find to fill their chassis (need a hint, it starts with an "M" and ends with an "axtor").

Then they push them beyond normal conditions by putting multiple drives in a hot case. The odds are bad enough that one Maxtor will die on you, do you want to rely on 2 or 4? In addition to that they put 1 tiny little fan in with very little for ventilation. I have even seen their cases with no fans! This is a data loss waiting to happen!

In addition to the high possibility of drive failure, I've had units where their controller board has died (one on my workbench right now).

Save yourself some trouble. Go buy something like a Mercury Elite. Good price, real striping, and always cool to the touch.

One is backup for the other one, which will always fail.

If you must buy a 2TB model, use it and power it off for that rainy day. No way would I want to keep one of these shaky jakes going all the time.

Yes, LaCie seems to be going downhill at the moment. Had many DVD or HD drives with no problem. However, recently several units were dead on arrival. We have a 500Gig NAS which works ok, but the new 1T we bought is a disaster. First one was doa, replacement one slows down to a crawl (~ a few kbs/s), or crashes when transferring ~5 Gig worth of files (a couple of thousand). A software patch they sent didn't help much. There seems to be serious driver problem here. LaCie claims this is normal... Why would I need a 1Gig interface, if a 10Mbps would be sufficient for that box.

The LaCie ethernet Bigdisk 1TB has serious NAS software bugs!!!