An accurate review of the LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini

Normally I would stand by LaCie's products. I've worked for companies that swear by them and until this year, I've never had anything bad to say about them. In March I purchased an Ethernet Disk Mini of the 500GB variety for $279. This was the model without gigabit ethernet, just standard old 10/100. After trying to set it up for about an hour, I determined that there was something wrong with the drive. My computer wasn't connecting to it properly and it wasn't shutting off. I could hold the power button for another hour, but nothing would happen. So, I called LaCie's customer support and they offered to replace the drive free of charge (through a fairly convoluted scheme: either I pay for shipping and they send me a new drive when they get mine, or I pay for a new drive, they pay for shipping, and refund my money when the receive the broken one). I opted for the latter option, as I had moved all of my music to the drive and no longer had space on my internal. While on the phone with them, I had noticed that the Gigabit version of the 500GB drive had dropped down to $209. So I asked, and they refunded my $70. Score one point for them.

The next week we picked up an identical drive to do networked backups at my workplace. The drive was dead on arrival. Turned on fine, but the configuration page was pure unrendered html. So, we phoned them up, and again they offered to replace the drive. This could have been coincidental, and at first I thought it was. I am no longer convinced.

In setting up the drive to do backups, I was greatly disappointed by the drive's lack of support for SSH or SFTP connections. Yes, I would love to have all of my backup data read by anyone on the University of California's LAN while it travels through the pipes. Perfect.

The next issue that came up was addressability over a subnet. We originally set it up with an IP in the 128.117.172.xx subnet, only to find that the building housing the clients' machines (128.117.170.xx) couldn't even see that the drive was there. We opened a ticket with LaCie's online support and have not heard anything back yet.

We made the mistake of bringing the drive into the 170 building while it was still configured for 172, thinking nothing of it. However, the drive threw a huge shit-fit, giving us error messages when using LaCie's proprietary IPConfigurator software. When we brought the drive back to the 172 building, everything was still fucked.

Rather than wait on their online ticketed support system, I decided to give them a ring. I explained to the seemingly friendly chap about my workplace mishaps with the Ethernet Disk Mini and he offered some suggestions: try connecting it directly to the computer by USB and then running the IPCnofigurator software. Ok, so he offered one suggestion. When the IPConfigurator software said it had found the drive but showed nothing in the list, our friend Ryan told us we would have to send the drive in, they would try to fix it or send us a new one.

My boss and I gave him a bit of grief for that one (it's our second drive, you guys used to be solid, etc), and rather than being a professional customer service representative, he got feisty on us and said something like well, we can call back and talk to another representative for the RMA procedure and then hung up.

Meanwhile, my drive at home isn't properly serving, and it's making crunchies that I can hear across the living room whenever I try to get a file list inside of Finder.


The system in the box is Windows Embedded, which means the device is basically a really old windows computer with a huge hard drive. It's clear that they rushed this guy out the door, as this is definitely a third distinct bug in the system, and it's really a shame. They used to be a reputable company with solid products (that were a bit expensive cause they were also a bit flashy). I was really happy with my d2 Triple Interface drive until it got stolen out of my car. Now, with my Ethernet Disk Mini crunching away and not publicly serving, I am thinking about the Western Digital myBook drive. Too bad those don't have FireWire 800. My audio latency will suffer.

So in short, don't buy a LaCie Ethernet Disk. In fact, don't buy anything from them at all. Do you really want to support a company that rushes buggy products out the door for profit? Oh, you're reading this on Windows... hmm.