ElectroNext.com

Best of the Ehternet Drives (2008-08-24)
Having just purchased this 1.5 TB drive from Amazon about a week ago, I'm still in the process of evaluating it, but, my first impressions are that of complete satisfaction in using this drive amongst 3 PCs in the household (2-Macs,1-PC). You don't need software to set up the drive. If you are somewhat familiar with setting up a home network, able to set up your router and PCs accordingly, and understand the basics of network security (passwords, user accounts, shared folders, firewall, etc), you'll have little difficulty getting this drive set up as it's menu is very intuative. As it's a fast drive (well over the 100 mb/s limit) and capable of using "Jumbo Frame" with speeds certainly beyond the 10/100 ethernet range, consider a 10/100/1000-gigabit router as well to assure you have the fastest input/output in your network. I tried a few other non-fan cooled drives in the past and own both fan and fanless external drives. No matter how well they say the drive will stay cool without an internal fan in the housing, I've never seen a non-fan drive stay cool for long, especially if it is running over several hours for a large backup or perhaps streaming video. I tried and returned (Best Buy, excellent sale price) a Seagate/Maxtor Central Axis Ethernet 1 TB drive because it lacked any fan, and the vents at the top of housing and the fact that it was made mostly of conductive aluminum did little to nothing to keep it from getting extremely hot over just a few or more hours. The Lacie has a smart fan which ramps up or down to adjust speeds to maintain control of internal temperature of the drive enclosure. In using it for over 10 hours the first day and backing up 450Gb or more of video and photos, it only got mildly warm. The housing does not get hot nor even close to any alarming temperature no matter how long the drive has been running, period. I'm still measuring maximum transfer speeds, but, so far on my Gigabit router, I'm getting speeds that certainly exceed the limits of my old 10/100 router and 10/100 desktop switchers. (make sure you have 10/100/1000 desktop switchers as well to get the benefits of a 10/100/1000 network). I've tested the system for an upcoming wireless video streaming set up and it works flawlessly. Front Row and my Mac works perfectly with this drive, it even sees this server drive and includes it in Front Row's menu (of course there's other ways to get this drive displayed on Front Row's menu when it opens using aliases of your external drive locations). Bottom line, for me, this drive is a keeper. It does everything well, is very stable to use and needs no software to install (shows up on your servers as long as you've set up the drive correctly as "administrator". The Central Axis drive I tried requires software to be installed on each Mac/PC) and I wasn't happy with that process. It's very reassuring in that the Lacie runs extremely cool (and fan is whisper quiet) and that translates into long life for the drive. I haven't tried the drive's external USB connection for other USB2 devices, but, expect that to perform just fine. The box was labeled "1TB" all over as Lacie also sells a 1TB version of this drive, with a blue oval adhesive label affixed to the front of the box which stated "1.5TB". Presumably Lacie is still updating packaging from it's current 1TB version, but, the newly released 1.5 TB capacity is certainly what you'll get in the box and another 500 Gigs of storage over 1TB is always better! Also, the drive enclosure is BIG and solid as well as heavy. The enclosure is much larger then a 3.5 drive would require and larger then any other external drive enclosures I've used, but, no matter, the drive is built like a tank and I have no issues with it's size. If you need lots of storage room for backups or for video streaming and want a stable and easy to use external device to store it all on, this is absolutely the way to go.

Compact NAS that seems to work (2007-11-09)
I've been the happy owner of a string of Lacie Big Disks, and been very happy with them - the form factor is convenient, they run fairly quiet (though the noise level does seem to increase with capacity) and I've had no problems with reliability (touch wood). This is the first NAS I've bought from them - I wanted it as a more portable backup for my Buffalo Terastation.


The drive seems to have been a good purchase so far, though it is noticably slower than the Buffalo, especially the web interface, which is therefore a bit of a chore to use. I had to disable the UPnP media server functionality to get decent browsing and file access speeds, though it may have settled down once it had finished indexing the content... it made the drive unusable when I had it on though, and I have no real need for it, so I haven't tried it again. I've had no problems with reliability or speed since.

Once I had my users and shares set up and my data copied from the Terastation though, it's done a fine job as a server, packing 2TB into a small enough package to carry around with you (though the weight means it'll be a good workout!). I use it mainly for holding music in large, lossless FLAC files, for which it works fine. It seems fast enough to play DVD files from too. If you need to take 2TB of NAS on the road with you, this seems to be your best choice.