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La Cie’s Ethernet Disk Mini isn’t the most sophisticated product in this group, but it’s a good option if you’re looking for an affordable way of adding some extra shared storage to your network.
Housed in La Cie’s trademark silvery-grey livery, the Ethernet Disk Mini is, in essence, a perfectly ordinary hard disk with an Ethernet interface slapped on to the back so that you can connect it to your network.
It doesn’t have the dual drives or Raid support found in most of its rivals, but that’s probably not a crucial factor for most home users. It doesn’t support Gigabit Ethernet either, although its 10/100 support will be perfectly adequate for most home users and small businesses.
What will appeal to home users, however, is the drive’s attractively low price – just £149 for our 250GB review unit (and less than £300 for its 500GB bigger brother). You don’t get much in the way of added features, though. There’s a single USB2 port that allows you to connect the drive directly to a PC, but you can’t use it to connect a printer or an additional USB hard disk.
There’s not much to shout about in the way of bundled software, either. This merely consists of La Cie’s IP configurator program, which assigns an IP address to the drive. The drive then appears within the ‘Network Places’ window on your desktop, rather than as a conventional drive in the ‘Your Computer’ window.
This point isn’t clearly explained by the rather skimpy manual, and a few other points – such as using your web browser to configure the drive – could use some clarification here as well.
La Cie could do with rewriting the manual to improve ease of use, but the Ethernet Disk Mini still stands out thanks to its value for money.
This article is part of a
group
test of network-attached devices.
See also
Adaptec Snap Server 110
Buffalo Linkstation Multimedia
Home Server
Buffalo Terastation Home
Server
Freecom Storage Gateway
WLAN
Iomega Storcenter Network Hard
Drive
Linksys EFG120
Maxtor Shared Storage II
Plextor PX-EH25L
Western Digital Netcenter
500
Living with NAS
DIY NAS
The table of features can be read via our pdf download.
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