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Ubuntu, OSX & the LaCie Network Space 1TB

I recently got myself a NAS from LaCie. The price was quite attractive and I badly needed the storage space as my old 300GB external hard disk from Western Digital was no longer enough.

This is my first experience in working with a NAS, here is a quick review:

First, my set up:

I have the NAS hooked up to my WGR614v6 router.
I connect to the NAS from two laptops and in both cases through WiFi.
My operating systems are OS X 10.5.5 and Ubuntu 8.10

Design

Perhaps the most striking aspect is the design. It is minimalist yet very elegant. Apparently it was designed by Neil Poulton, and although I have no idea who he is, I think this was a most successful design.

Pros

Due to its function, a NAS is great if you have several computers in the house and wish to easily share data between them, or make backups. The NAS is a central storage location.

The LaCie Network Space comes with private and public storage locations. Two user accounts, one for managing the NAS and also accessing the private storage area, and another for the public storage. It can act as an FTP server and a media server to deliver content to upnp media players.

Administration is carried out through the browser. The LaCie has status lights that can be turned on and off through the administration page. The software includes a LaCie Network Agent that can help you access the administration page, configure ethernet settings manually and connect to the NAS.

The Network Agent work in OSX, Linux and Windows.

It has a usb socket for attaching other hard disks and thereby increasing the storage space. You cannot attach it to a computer however.

Cons

It does not have raid and cannot act as a webserver / mysql server. In this price range (€150) that is to be expected.

The configuration possibilities are minimal and basic. This NAS is designed for home use. Connect and forget.

It scans the media files once an hour, during this time, if you are copying to or from the NAS the speeds will drop. If your media collection is small (under 60GB) this won't be an issue.

File Transfer Speeds

The speeds are based entirely on the method you choose to connect to the NAS. I connect through WiFi (g) and average about 2.5-3MB/sec. That is not much but it is okay for my needs as I do not have many large files to copy back and forth.

The LaCie does support Gigabit LAN and so you should average better speeds if using that method of connection.

Setup under OSX

Under OSX setup should be quite straight forward. The LaCie Network Space can be access through the LaCie Network Agent in the menu bar:

Or through Shared:

To map the NAS folders, select System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items. Drag the share’s icon from your desktop into the list of applications.

Setup under Ubuntu

The easiest method in my opinion is to mount the LaCie NAS in your fstab file. First create your mount points in /media:

sudo mkdir /media/openshare

and

sudo mkdir /media/myshare

Then add these lines to your /etc/fstab file:

//192.168.1.64/openshare/ media/openshare cifs 0 0
//192.168.1.64/myshare/ media/myshare cifs username=user,password=password 0 0

or you can use the smb protocol:

//192.168.1.64/openshare/ media/openshare smbfs 0 0
//192.168.1.64/myshare/ media/myshare smbfs username=user,password=password 0 0

(edit ip numbers, mount point names, usernames and password to suite your needs)