I purchased the device from Newegg for just under $200. Seems like a good deal, and I'm impressed with the manufacturing of the device, the thing is heavy and it's solid. It comes with USB, CAT5, and power cables, pretty nice for the price considering when you buy a printer, you don't even get a USB cable.
The NAS drive arrived around lunch time today. I was working from home so that I could sign for it when it arrived. I immediately took it out to the garage, and put it with all my networking gear. I unboxed it, plugged in the CAT5 and power, and went back inside. I sat down at my laptop and ran AngryIPScanner, looked for the new device, and opened up Internet Explorer and connected to the IP address over HTTP.
There was a page with an administration link, and a list of all the current shares that were setup. I clicked the administration link, and was challenged to enter security credentials, a guess of admin/admin and I was in. First order of business, change the admin password. Then I renamed the device "NAS". So now all my network devices can see a 'thing' called NAS on the network. It even picked up DHCP, DNS, and the gateway all automatically, nice.
I created three shares initially in the the LaCie interface, itunes, photos, and misc. I then terminaled into my desktop machine where the majority of my media and photos are. I mapped a drive to the NAS itunes share, and after entering the userid and password, I was connected. I started to copy all of my itunes and photo files to the respective shares on the NAS, I did the same with my laptop.
I copied Gigabytes of data to the device, it pretty much finished around 4:00 PM. So the copy process of almost 50GB was not too slow really. Here are some screen shots of the device's user interface, it's not glamorous, but it's clean, and makes sense.
Impressions
The thing just feels good when you hold it. Like it's really solid and engineered well. Setup took me less than a minute. I'm going to post more about the details of the device in the coming weeks. My plan is to put all of our media onto it, music, photos, movies, etc. Thus having an entry point for all computers on my network to access said data. I'd also like to create some sort of automated backup to it as well.
I have not installed the LaCie software yet, but I'm curious what's on the disk, so I probably will. More on that in a later post. So far, I'm totally stoked for the amount of money I spent, for what I've actually gotten. How often can you say that?
Screenshots of the User Interface (web based from the device)
Here is the status screen that shows the shares, and what services can connect to them.
Network details
Disk usage metrics (just after I started copying to it)
Service status screen
