Product Reviews

LaCie's Ethernet Disk mini is a network storage device that can either sit on an Ethernet network and be read from and written to by every Mac or Windows machine on the network, or can connect directly to a Mac using a USB 2 cable.

It comes in LaCie's robust metal d2 casing and ships with a stand, an Ethernet cable, a USB cable, a power supply and a somewhat skimpy manual. There are three capacities: 250GB, 400GB and 500GB.

Setting up the Ethernet Disk mini is pretty straightforward, although the manual could be more detailed. Selecting Connect to Server from the Finder and then clicking on the workgroups icon displays the disk 'EDmini', to which you can then connect using the default name and password.

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A volume called 'Shares' mounts on your Mac's desktop. So far so good.

An IP configuration utility enables you to set an IP address for the drive, and you can configure it further using a web browser. The Ethernet Disk mini can be set up as a Mac file server, Windows file server, HTTP server and FTP server. However, it is formatted as FAT 32, and this presents some problems when connecting from Mac OS X. Most notably, there is no support for long filenames and some characters. This could be a serious issue if you intend using it as a music server to store your iTunes files, for example.

Using the browser configuration, it is possible to customise nearly every parameter, including the name of the disk and who can connect to it. However, we couldn't change the name of the shared volume. This could be problematic if you have more than one of these disks on a network and need to connect to both at the same time.

File-transfer speed will depend on your network, although if fast throughput is vital to you, plump for a FireWire 800 drive.

If you can live with no long-filename support and only intend using one of these disks on your network, the LaCie Ethernet Disk mini is a cost-effective solution. But there are too many potential problems for us to recommend it unreservedly.