The LaCie 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2 is shipped with the following installation components:
An additional plastic bag with screws has been provided to fasten hard drives to the hard drive drawers. If you must secure hard drives to the hard drive trays, make certain to use the included screws.
The instructions below are also available on the Quick Start Guide included with the LaCie 8big.
If your LaCie 8big shipped with eight hard drives, you can skip this section and move to Step 1. If your LaCie 8big shipped with empty hard drive slots, consider the following:
Attach the cable management arm to the back of the rack rails.
Perform the steps below on the PC that will use the 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2.
Since the hard drives are formatted for Mac (HFS+), all partitions must be erased, including the EFI partition. Windows Disk Management cannot erase the EFI partition so you must run Diskpart, a separate Windows utility. For additional information on Diskpart, see the web site.
Diskpart confirms that your hard drive is clean, meaning that the partitions have been deleted. The LaCie product is ready to be formatted for your operating system. See Step 7 - Format the hard drives for instructions.
You can customize the storage device by reformatting it with separate file system formats. Review the formats below.
exFAT: exFAT is an update of FAT32, allowing for compatibility with Windows and Mac. While FAT32 is limited in regard to volume and file sizes, exFAT allows for volumes up to 128PB and files up to 16EB. Similar to FAT32, exFAT is not optimized for performance with Windows devices.
NTFS: This acronym stands for New Technology File System, and it is the native file system for Windows 7 and Windows 8. NTFS offers several features that are not available with exFAT: file compression, encryption, permissions, auditing, and mirroring drives. The minimum supported volume size for NTFS is 10MB with a maximum of 2TB when initialized in the MBR format. For greater flexibility, use the GPT format with NTFS to remove limits on file and partition sizes. Volumes created in NTFS are native read and write for Windows 7 and Windows 8. Mac OS X 10.5 or higher can read and write to the NTFS partitions with the help of third-party drivers.
See the table below for a comparison of NTFS and exFAT.
Windows file system formats |
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Use NTFS if: |
…you will be using the storage device only with Windows 7 and Windows 8. NTFS performance is significantly better than exFAT. This file system is also compatible in read-only mode with Mac OS 10.3 and higher. |
Use exFAT if: |
…you will be using your storage device with both Windows and Mac computers. Performance is not optimized for Thunderbolt/Thunderbolt 2. |
The steps listed below help you to format the storage device.
LaCie RAID Manager is the software utility that manages the LaCie 8big’s storage.
For instructions, see the LaCie RAID Manager user manual.