My thoughts on the 1TB LaCie Net­work Space exter­nal hard drive

I recently pur­chased this device from B&H Photo hop­ing to solve my messy media dilemma. Before this, I had 4 or 5 sep­a­rate exter­nal hard dri­ves hold­ing all of my media, appli­ca­tions & back­ups which I quickly real­ized needed to change after acci­den­tally delet­ing a whole photo shoot because “I was sure” it was backed up on another disk.

The LaCie Net­work space proved to be a great pur­chase. It’s packed full of use­ful fea­tures com­bined with lots of stor­age and a slick design that I’m not afraid to have out on dis­play for all to see.

The Pros:

• UPnP AV Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion (This means just plug it in and it works)
• Remote FTP Access (This is espe­cially cool, I can access files from any­where in the world with FTP. I can also give a login to my friends and share large files with them.)
• 5 Simul­ta­ne­ous Users Sup­ported (I’m call­ing this a “Pro” for home use because I only need 3 to 4 max. But this could eas­ily be a “Con” if the device were used on a large net­work in a place of busi­ness where mul­ti­ple users need to access files simultaneously.)
• Streams media files through devices such as Xbox 360™ and Sony Playsta­tion® 3, or acts as an iTunes music server. (This fea­ture is very nice to have. I share an iTunes music library with my spouse and never have to worry about dupli­cates or con­sol­i­dat­ing on our lap­tops or desk­tops. Also, when I’m in the bed­room, on the lap­top or at the TV, I never have to worry about where that movie is saved.)
• Wire­less Time Machine Back­ups (With a bit of fid­dling you can use this to wire­lessly backup your Mac in Time Machine any­time you are on the net­work. No more excuses for why you didn’t do a backup) *You can find the instruc­tions for this at the bot­tom of the post. ** For you Win­dows users, LaCie offers the Genie Backup Assis­tant for free avail­able on their web­site.
  
• A two year man­u­fac­ture war­ranty (That’s always nice. You never know with hard drives.)
• It looks sweet (Has a blue LED ground light that flick­ers with data access, also you have the option of turn­ing this light off.)
• USB 2.0 port on the front of the device (This is used to con­nect an exter­nal USB hard drive or USB key. Using admin page, you can to back
  up files on your LaCie Net­work Space to the exter­nal disk or import data to the LaCie Net­work Space.)

And the Cons:

• Expen­sive (It is priced a bit higher than most net­work hard dri­ves, but if you find a sale like I did, you won’t be wal­low­ing over your empty wal­let.)
• Slow data trans­fers (Even though it’s 10/100/1000 it only trans­fers files at a painful 6.6 megabytes per sec­ond which is crip­pled even fur­ther when access­ing VIA wire­less net­work so trans­fer­ring large files is restricted to LAN only.)
• Non remov­able stor­age (This can be con­sid­ered a major flaw. You’re lim­ited to the 1tb disk that’s and if you want more you’ll have to either use up the front USB port, or buy another net­work drive which can be bad for the wallet.
• Web admin­is­tra­tion inter­face (The aes­thet­ics of the device cer­tainly don’t carry over to the web admin­is­tra­tion. The con­trol panel’s user inter­face is a joke, and it’s user man­age­ment and secu­rity sec­tion needs a seri­ous rethink­ing. This of course can be fixed with a sim­ple firmware update, so hope is not entirely lost.)

Over­all the LaCie Net­work Space is a sim­ple and attrac­tive solu­tion to your home media needs. If you’re look­ing for some­thing to per­ma­nently hold all of your movies, pho­tos & music, this is the drive for you. If you’re look­ing for a high per­for­mance drive to use for lots of trans­fer­ring and porta­bil­ity, you’ll want to keep looking.

*Set­ting up the net­work drive as a wire­less Time Machine backup drive on a Mac will require you to jump through a few flam­ing hoops. Thank­fully there is a thor­oughly detailed tuto­r­ial over at Expand­ing Hori­zons on how to set it up prop­erly.