Product Description

Centralize all of your files and share them among networked PC/Mac computers or UPnPTM AV certified players. Transfer and back up files from your computers easily, and connect a hard disk or digital camera through the extra USB port for directly storing yo

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49409 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: LaCie
• Model: 301389EK
• Released on: 2008-08-04
• Dimensions: 7.60" h x 4.61" w x 1.77" l, 2.09 pounds
• Hard Disk: 500GB

Customer Reviews

Doesn't sleep
This is a pretty good product for home use except that it's power hungry. They don't quote power use in the specs or manuals (naughty), and there is no reference to any kind of power-saving mode, so I wrote and asked. They replied "20-25W" and "there isn't any sleep mode".

It seems poor that a drive designed (I believe) for the domestic market, where it is unlikely to be in use much of the time, has no 'sleep' mode. Do the sums - if it runs 24x7 and uses 25w, it will cost close on £30 in electricity every year. Just for a single hard drive. Not clever.

Unbelievably Slow
Technically, it supports Gigabit Ethernet but performance is way below what you would expect from a Gigabit capable device. As a test I copied a 1GB folder containing 110 files of various sizes between computers over my Gigabit network and achieved transfer rates of 38-42 MB/s. Copying the same folder to or from the LaCie drive over the same network was much slower and came in around a measly 6MB/s! That's barely 100BaseT performance!

On the positive side, it is a really good looking drive and it was easy to get it up and running but that's where the good news ends.

If you want a fast network drive, this one doesn't have the performance. If you're happy with slower performance, there are better value options available with 100BaseT connections. I've bought a number of LaCie drives with Firewire800 connections over the years and been very happy with them but this one leaves me feeling conned out of £125 for something that doesn't do the business. It only got a rating of 1 because the software won't let me give it the big fat zero it deserves.

Very easy to use but could be so much better
I've had this drive for a few months now and it is very easy to use - I'm on vista.
Plug it into your router and install the software and away you go - 1TB of storage on your network.

It's not actually *that* slow - when I connect the laptop to the router with a cable I get 6MB/s (48Mb/s) write speed but that's the same as I get with a usb hard drive. Try to do the same thing over a wireless connection however and you will have to wait four times as long for the transfer. Any significant file transfer is going to take several hours.
Browsing the drive in windows explorer can be horrendously slow - to open a folder with a few hundred or thousand files can take several minutes.

Trying to stream movies from it is a bit of a nightmare - the video is guaranteed to get choppy for at least a few minutes. I can only assume that when it's getting choppy the network drive is busy running another task as well as streaming video but there is no way to control or even to see what the drive is doing as there is only a very basic web interface to the drive.

The network storage is useful but it's so frustrating - it could have been so much better. But the response time with vista means it feels like the drive is on the other side of the world.

update:
You can connect another usb hard drive directly to the network drive and backup to/from this drive. It didn't work when I tried to backup to an ntfs usb drive - it just seemed to stop part of the way through with no errors or indication. Fat32 wasnt' an option because of >4GB files. Backup to ext3 drive did work. I got 20Mb/s meaning that a full backup of the 1TB drive took 5 days. There is no option to do a incremental backup after that - so it will take 5 days to backup the drive every time. Hardly realistic.