Pros & Cons
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- Good price, good media-serving abilities.
- Easy, flexible Web-sharing capability.
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- Slightly anemic hardware even considering the low price.
- No internal redundancy.
- Installation process is rough.
LaCie Ethernet Disk mini Home Edition Specs
| External USB Hard Disk Expansion | |
| Hard Disk Configuration | Fixed Single |
| Media Server | |
| Network Medium | Wired |
| Printer Server | |
| Rack-mount or Standalone | Standalone |
| Remote Access | |
| UPnP Capable | |
| Wired Network Speed | 10/100/1000 |
The LaCie Ethernet Disk mini–Home Edition is, much like the HP MediaSmart Server (our current Editors' Choice among home NAS devices), a team effort. The hardware comes from LaCie, and Axentra provides its slick HipServ software, which offers some features you won't find in Windows Home Server (WHS), the OS on the much more expensive MediaSmart. Sadly, the LaCie is also slower, harder to set up, and lacks some of the options HP offers for ensuring data integrity. Still, it costs a third of the MediaSmart's $600 price. The question is, is your data worth the extra $400 dollars?
Setup Sorrows
This was definitely the low point of my testing experience. The setup procedure needs work, especially considering that this bundle is meant for a home audience. You get one disc for setting up the hardware and another that has Mac and Windows versions of the software setup program—but no indication about which disc to run first. The program on the hardware disc was almost superfluous; I had to tell it to run its IP Configurator to get a network address. This is a process that should kick off automatically, without being told to start. (In fact, some NAS devices get a network address entirely on their own—no software needed.) You'll also see an option for installing LaCie's 1-Click Backup freeware, because the company sells this device in a configuration without Axentra HipServ software. Don't do the install; the software has its own backup capability. LaCie shouldn't confuse the issue in this way during the install, and it should have gone to the trouble of putting the entire install on a single disc, leaving out the unnecessary components.
Even figuring out when you can actually run the install software can be frustrating. The instructions tell you to wait until the power light on the front of the NAS box is glowing a steady blue, but the indicator seems to blink in time with network activity, so you can wait awfully long for a steady glow. Then the install wouldn't work with my networked Vista laptop. When the software disc finally worked (I had to use an XP laptop), I ended up at the LaCie account-generation site, which is really part of the HipServe install procedure. While that didn't hurt anything, I wound up going through account generation twice.
The HipServ install went no better. The software refused to see the LaCie drive—which was receiving packets just fine—from either laptop. I had to plug in another Vista machine, and that ran the installer. Once that worked, all the client PCs saw the LaCie mini—Home. Getting the client software running is not only tricky, it's also important: HipServ wants a client on every PC accessing the NAS, both for security and because the client installs a separate backup application, HipServ Desktop Mirror.
The end of the HipServ installation takes you to LaCie's Web site, where you register the product and create an account. Don't skip this step, because setting up the account gives you a Web site (typically with a URL of the form yourhipservname.homelacie.com) that lets you log in to the NAS from any Web browser. This is basically the same as the Windows Home Server remote-access feature, except that, unlike WHS, LaCie does the setup quietly, in the background. Some users may not realize that the account sign-up is for more than marketing purposes and may opt out, thus unwittingly forgoing their ability to get to the NAS when away from home. Again, the process functions, but LaCie needs to do more work to make the setup simple enough for the home NAS user.
Oh, and PS: None of this works without a UPnP-enabled router. You'll be able to access most of the local HipServ features without one, but remote access, some of the media serving, and even reliable local client access go out the window without UPnP. Most newer home routers have this feature built in, but if you're working on a five- or six-year-old one, you'll certainly need a firmware upgrade and possibly a whole new router. Something to think about when adding up just how much the LaCie mini–Home really costs.—
A Nice Interface
Installation hassles aside, once you get up and running, the HipServ software actually provides a good user interface. Click on the icon the installer puts in the system tray and you can access the NAS via a local console or the Web, set preferences, and configure the backup. Permissions are basic: Anyone can access anything in what the software calls the Family Library; users also have individual MyLibrary areas. This local desktop view, however, is very no-frills. To access the deeper media-sharing features, including the contact database, you have to use the Web interface, and to get to this, you need to log in through the Web portal (which you might not have access to, if you were fooled at installation, as I mentioned above).
The difference between the HipServ Web portal and WHS remote access is that Microsoft's version is viewable only by a WHS user logging in with the right credentials. The HipServ portal combines private and public features. If you want, you can publish content like movies or photos and restrict access to users with accounts on your LaCie mini–Home. Via a contact database, you can also assign shares to anyone you know and even send out e-mails inviting people to see new content. You can also simply make the content public, so it would be available to anyone accessing your portal site. The site even allows access via Windows Mobile devices, iPhones, and other portables.
The HipServ software also allows the NAS to act as a digital media server with support for a wide variety of formats and protocols: UPnP AV (Universal Plug and Play audiovisual), iTunes, and Windows Media are the key ones, but you'll also find support for MPEG-1 to MPEG-4, AVI, DivX, and Xvid, among others, on the video side; MP3, WMA, WAV, and more on the audio side; and even vTuner and Shoutcast for streaming Internet radio.—
Adequate Performance
I ran the LaCie on a Gigabit Ethernet network that connected to the Internet through a 10/100 Netgear FVS114 Internet router/firewall with UPnP enabled. Note that the 10/100 router wasn't a bottleneck, since it was still faster than the Internet connection. Actual file access and streaming went through a D-Link DGS-2208 8-port Gigabit switch. When I ran the Iozone benchmark test, average write speed with 32MB files was 14.1 MBps, dropping to 10 MBps when file size increased to 1GB. Read performance started at just over 18 MBps for 32MB files, dropping to 14.5 MBps with 1GB files. Plugging the local network into the Netgear (instead of the Gigabit switch) to measure straight 100-Mbps performance produced an average read/write time of about 12.5 MBps.
Those numbers aren't bad, considering that the LaCie uses a Marvell processor, which isn't the world's fastest CPU, and contains a single 500GB hard drive with just 32MB of RAM. And remember, this puppy costs only $199 as tested; the HP MediaSmart is faster, but it sets you back $599.99 (direct). Still, if you're planning on serving lots of video from this box, you may be disappointed at the performance.
This is where you'll need to decide what's important to you. The LaCie mini–Home has a good price and fine remote-access and media-serving features. But the HP is expandable—with a capacity limited only by that of the hard drives you plug in. In addition, the HP MediaSmart, like any WHS server, lets you add external USB drives to the mix: The LaCie mini–Home won't, and if its one drive fails, you're out of luck unless you've backed everything up somewhere else. Backing up is a good idea with the HP MediaSmart, too, but at least it runs a RAID-like folder duplication feature that can span data across multiple drives, so if one fails the others still save your precious bits and bytes.
Overall, I liked the HipServ software, but, even discounting the many installation hassles, I didn't find it noticeably easier to use than Windows Home Server. And while HipServ has better media-serving capabilities than WHS, Microsoft's OS integrates better with Windows PCs and does remote access with remote control—a feat that HipServ can't match. Personally, I'd opt for data protection and a higher price and leave the media serving to a media extender or a WHS plug-in. But for folks who don't want to spend more than $200 on home network storage, and who need only a single-disk storage bin, the LaCie might be the way to go.
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Final Thoughts
LaCie Ethernet Disk mini Home Edition
The combination of LaCie's hardware and Axentra's software is good if you want a cheap media-serving and Web-sharing solution, but not so good for those wanting fast performance, data redundancy, and tighter integration with Windows.