If you have a computer, it’s likely that it is a laptop. A handy, take-anywhere, do-anything computer that has one shortcoming: storage. You can of course stick in a bigger hard drive, but that doesn’t help if you have a ton of movies, and it certainly makes backing up trickier. This is where Lacie’s new Network Space comes in. The sleek block of black is designed to make hooking up easy, even without wires.
To show how convoluted laptop management can get, let’s look at my own (admittedly rather paranoid) setup. My MacBook has a 500GB hard drive inside. At the desk, I hook into a USB hub to which is connected a 500GB external drive and used by Time Machine. In addition, I have a bunch of movies and TV shows on another 500GB drive, and every few days I make a bootable backup to a smaller 320GB, bus-powered hard drive using the excellent Super Duper, from Shirt Pocket software. Finally, I use Backblaze for off-site backup ($5 per month, or the price of two bottles of beer in my local bar).
That’s a lot of cables and a lot of mental overhead trying to remember to do it all. And that’s why the Network Space looks so attractive. NAS (Network Attached Storage) isn’t new, but this Lacie gets a lot right. First, it’s $160 for a terabyte, almost $100 less than Apple’s Time Capsule. It has a sleep mode, can be woken over the network and the USB port means you can hook up another drive to it. There is even an option to control the glowing light, and it will work as an iTunes server, and serve files to Macs, Windows machines and games consoles.
Perfect, right? You can just throw this in a closet with a power supply and forget about it. Sadly, no. You need to run a cable to your router as the Network Space is Ethernet-only, with no Wi-Fi. So close, Lacie, so close. You almost made the perfect solution. Maybe I should buy that Time Capsule after all.
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