LaCie Network Space 1TB External Hard Drive NAS Network Attached Storage / Designed By Neil Poulton

For a budget network disk, this is quite literally incredible value. If it's setup properly and you have networking kit capable of it you can get excellent speeds out of it - right now I'm transferring 18.9GB of files at around 4.2MB/second, and it's going to take about an hour, which is as much as you can realistically expect from a network disk running on the vast majority of home network kit - I know of business-level kit that can't maintain that sort of speed.

It's not without it's niggles though. The disk is fairly loud by comparison to some disks, but as this is a network disk designed to be put near a router and left there this isn't really too big a deal. What is, is that there's no power-saving mode - the disk is always spinning all the time, even if it's not connected. This is something of an oversight considering network disks are generally left on 24/7. You can always just switch it off though...but don't do this at the mains! It has it's own operating system so you… more »

For a budget network disk, this is quite literally incredible value. If it's setup properly and you have networking kit capable of it you can get excellent speeds out of it - right now I'm transferring 18.9GB of files at around 4.2MB/second, and it's going to take about an hour, which is as much as you can realistically expect from a network disk running on the vast majority of home network kit - I know of business-level kit that can't maintain that sort of speed.

It's not without it's niggles though. The disk is fairly loud by comparison to some disks, but as this is a network disk designed to be put near a router and left there this isn't really too big a deal. What is, is that there's no power-saving mode - the disk is always spinning all the time, even if it's not connected. This is something of an oversight considering network disks are generally left on 24/7. You can always just switch it off though...but don't do this at the mains! It has it's own operating system so you need to use the power switch on the device so it shuts down properly, just like you need to shut your computer down properly.

Also, whilst LaCie kindly provide a password-protected share on the drive, you can't turn off the share that isn't password protected. In home networks this might not be so bad, but I live in an apartment block where the ISP for some reason has a central LAN and everyone can access every share, so really I would like to be able to turn off the password protected shares to guarantee other people can't access my disk. Similarly, you can't setup more shares - so you can't for example have a share for each family members documents. This is another oversight, but something most could probably live with.

Overall then, a brilliant little stylish black box that doesn't really look out of place anywhere, and a performer too! If a fairly basic but fairly good network storage space is what you want, then you need spend no more than what you can find this for!

On a sidenote, "Knacker" seems to have a problem understanding different types of connectivity - of course you're going to get better speeds on a USB or eSata connection, these are directly wired to the computer, and also never realistically perform to their theoretical maximum speeds (which are the ones he's relying on), so basically the comparisons he is making are completely useless to anybody. I'd love to see him transfer any sort of file at all to his eSata disk when his computer is on the other side of the house.

Direct-connection (USB, eSata) disks serve completely different purposes to network disks. Network disks are for data that is supposed to be accessible anywhere - multimedia or backups, for example my laptops are setup to backup every day to the network disk so that I don't have to worry about being near a disk, it just carries on and backs-up my data.