THE MAKER OF designer computer accessories – LaCie – has come up with a new device called the Wireless Space which as an intriguing combination of a wireless router and a NAS with a few other features thrown in for good measure. As with most of LaCie’s products, the Wireless Space features a very distinct design and although in this case it happens to be a black brick rather than something a bit more unusual, the plain design is actually quite appealing.
LaCie is offering two models of the Wireless Space with either 1TB or 2TB of storage space. At the rear of the Wireless Space you’ll find a WAN port, three Gigabit Ethernet ports and two USB 2.0 ports, with a further USB 2.0 port around the front. The Wi-Fi antennas are built into the device and the Wireless Space supports 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and there’s a WPS button on the front which should allow for relatively painless connection to the wireless network. Oddly enough, we can’t find any details as to whether the Wireless Space supports 150Mbit/s or 300Mbit/s 802.11n Wi-Fi.
Other features include UPnP, DLNA and iTunes support for media streaming. The Wireless Space also supports Apple’s Time Machine and Windows Backup which will allow it to act as a network backup device. Additional hard drives up to 2TB in size can be connected via the USB 2.0 ports and you can of course attach other USB storage devices to it as well. LaCie claims up to 35MB/s over the Gigabit Ethernet ports which isn’t what we’d call class leading, but then again we wouldn’t expect that for this kind of product.
The 1TB version is expected to hit retail at $229.99 with the 2TB version coming it at $349.99 which compares quite favorably to Apple’s Time Capsule which will set you back $299 for 1TB or a whopping $499 for 2TB. Apple’s only advantage over the LaCie is support for 5GHz wireless and printer server functionality, but that doesn’t quite seem worth the extra money, at least not to us.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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