LaCie Ethernet Disk mini Home Edition 1TB review

LaCie’s Ethernet Disk mini Home Edition looks very different to its Internet Space, as it has a sturdy metal case instead of a glossy white one, but otherwise they’re very similar.

They use the same setup utility and web management interface. The setup utility checks for the latest firmware update and installs it. The web interface is logically organised and easy to grasp. As with the Internet Space, it has a private My Library folder for each user and a public Family Library folder for sharing files. It’s not as flexible as the user controls on the other NAS devices here, but is easy to grasp.

Both devices also share the same excellent remote access feature. It’s the best-designed remote access capability of any NAS here. Unlike Western Digital’s remote access feature, the Ethernet Disk’s file browser uses all the available space in your web browser window. You can upload multiple files just as quickly and easily as you can download them.

Unlike the Internet Space, the Ethernet Disk won’t let you share a USB printer, and iTunes didn’t recognise it as a music server. It generally worked well as a UPnP media server, although when watching an action movie using a network media player, we noticed occasional pauses during the most frantic scenes.

We were surprised to find that the Ethernet Disk was slower in our file-transfer benchmarks than the Internet Space. It copied large files at an average speed of 5.2MB/s, which is 1.7MB/s slower than the Internet Space, and small files at an average of 4.8MB/s, which is 1.3MB/s slower. This performance is particularly poor, as the Internet Space was already one of the slower NAS devices here.

The 1TB Ethernet Disk is inexpensive at 15p per gigabyte and its remote access feature is well designed, but you’ll have to live without a USB print server and put up with its poor performance. If you don’t need remote access, or you can settle for a less well-designed implementation, the My Book World is a better choice as it’s faster and even cheaper.