LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini

...specs and even talked to Lacie before purchasing, so I was sure that the promised specs were true.

After many time waiting due to the difficulty of getting this unit in spain, I finally got the drive, and then all the surprises came.

The unit is in general terms very slow; we use a normal ethernet LAN and the performance compared with other drives is very poor. Even the connection via USB is very slow, nothing to do ...
...I started multiple trheads with Lacie support and all ended in confirming the poor performance of the unit; they do not officially or non-oficially stated at any time this, but followed the typical customer support technique of getting you tired of getting nothing solved.
They sayed for example that this was a 'USB-ethernet connection' which is 'intended to be slower than ethernet', and always ended the support with the instructions for resetting ... more

I completely agree with the previous review, and there's nothing much to say for this item. It sucks!! I wasted my company money and their confidence on me with this little piece of crap.

So, how did I end buying this?
On a Tom's Hardware review I saw this item, which has the ability of being an ethernet disk and an USB disk at the same time, which at the moment, was an innovation.
With such a configuration the disk can be accesible to ethernet users even at [theoric] gigabit speeds and at the same time being accessed by a local user through USB connection. This was the perfect solution for us, since my mates needed an ethernet disk always available and I needed a hi-speed access to it due to the huge amount of files I manage, both in number and size.

I downloaded the specs and even talked to Lacie before purchasing, so I was sure that the promised specs were true.

After many time waiting due to the difficulty of getting this unit in spain, I finally got the drive, and then all the surprises came.

The unit is in general terms very slow; we use a normal ethernet LAN and the performance compared with other drives is very poor. Even the connection via USB is very slow, nothing to do with the [theoric] 400MB speed you may get with a normal USB disk.
The web interface is also very slow, so slow indeed that many times you think that the unit is broken because of its unresponsiveness.

I started multiple trheads with Lacie support and all ended in confirming the poor performance of the unit; they do not officially or non-oficially stated at any time this, but followed the typical customer support technique of getting you tired of getting nothing solved.
They sayed for example that this was a 'USB-ethernet connection' which is 'intended to be slower than ethernet', and always ended the support with the instructions for resetting the unit to its factory defaults ...

Among its limitations, the unit cannot be formatted to NTFS for example, cannot be defragmented and big files are welcomed with a 'no-no'.
If you plan to expand the unit via its USB expansion port, you need to format the new drive to FAT32, and doom it to the general slow performance of the unit. Big files are directly rejected with writting errors. I had this problem with a 1.07 GB and 727 MB files. LAcie support didn't help of course...

It also vibrates a lot, so I put it over its own 'egg-packet' box, so it does not make my table seems a washing machine.

The idea was good, the design is good but the implementation sucks, just in the general way of Lacie products. With a little more effort they just could be doing great things in storage, instead of selling unfinished sketches like this one. 

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