Customer Reviews

LaCie 250GB Ethernet Disk Mini External Hard Drive (300938U)

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The NAS concept is nice but tricky. You cannot pop this bad boy on ethernet and expect it to work like all your other hard drives, which is more or less how they sell it. It comes preformatted FAT32, which limits your file size to 4GB and has no security features, which works as long as you don't use backup software & hope to use it over your network. In this situation, as mine, where your backups are dumped into a single conglomerated file reaching several GB, your only option is a drive connected directly to a machine running an OS, like a server or peer-peer network connection. Sure, you can connect this drive via USB, but why spend the extra $ on an ethernet connection, processor, & web interface? A $69 plain vanilla external hard drive will be all you need and can use unless you're willing to put up with the signficant restrictions of NAS. I didn't know that before I plunked down my $200; hopefully you will.

If you think you're gonna hook this guy to your network, map it and you're done... oooh boy what a dissapointment!

This is merely a glorified USB hard disk (it looks good though). It's FAT32 preformatted, so any files larger than 4GB (such as my AVI and MPEG files) mean trouble. Add to that file naming and file sharing and much more...

At such a price, do yourself and your wallet a favor and don't bother.

I have 3 LaCie drives, no problems with any. However the limitations pointed out in the comments apply, and I did not know beforehand that formatting was fixed to FAT32.

My main disappointment however is, in the ethernet mode I am using it in (i.e. not locally connected), it is much slower than I expected. It has its own little computer inside running Linux, and it is not as fast (file-sharing) as it should be.

Great drive, but you need to have XP Pro in order to use it. You need to turn off Windows Simple File Sharing which can ONLY be done with XP Pro.
Note that I called LaCie tech support and they were amazing and tried to help me the best they could. They even found out a work around to solve this issue but no satifacti=ory for most people.

I purchased a LaCie NAS drive approximately 18 months ago. The product had several shortcomings including the inability to back-up files that did not meet its highly restrictive file name rules. This turned out to be nearly half of my files. The documentation with the product was terrible. Now, 18 months later, the drive ceases to function and LaCie refuses to repair it because:

"Unfortunately, LaCie does not handle out-of-warranty repairs. It is
usually not cost effective to repair electronics since the price for new
drives has come down and the capacity has increased".

I can understand a response like this on a $99 product but not a $600 NAS. My advice: Don't buy LaCie!

Please do not make the same mistake I did. Drive crashed after just six months and we LOST ALL OF THE DATA IN IT. Go with well-established brands like Seagate, Maxtor, or WD.