[geeks] Thoughts? (Cheap NAS with nice feature set)

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Nadine Miller <velociraptor at gmail.com>
>Date: 2008/04/07 Mon AM 08:17:27 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Thoughts? (Cheap NAS with nice feature set)

>Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> On Apr 4, 2008, at 10:35 , Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> 
>>> It's $120 + cost of HDs from Newegg.com, but it looks pretty nice for 
>>> certain
>>> applications:
>>>
>>> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822344001
>>>
>>> Mfg. link: http://www.galaxymetalgear.com/Products/3500MGBR_pro.html
>>>
>>> 2 SATA bays, RAID 1/0, USB expandability, 10/100/1000 ethernet, etc...
>> 
>> http://en.nas-4220.org/index.php/Main_Page
>> 
>> I'm disappointed that people have not lined up to hack the Hammer NAS I 
>> bought last year, since it would seem possible too.
>> 
>> Seems to me it is slower than the Hammer, but cheaper too.
>> 
>The reviews @ Newegg do not inspire a lot of confidence, though.  Not 
>recognizing HD's on start up? 3 minute boot times?

IIRC there are a handful of reviews, with half at "five stars", the rest across the board. I question the abilities of many reviewers at Newegg, esp. for a box like this one.

Understand, I've never touched one of these units, but as an example, I have a Netgear SC101 - a piece of crap, dog-slow NAS box that requires you to install software on each PC that you want to access the storage from - and most reviewers crucify it as pure garbage. If I were to write a review for the unit today, after I just dug it out of storage, I'd say:

"Runs OK with latest firmware, performance not stellar, but very reasonable for small file storage/archives, and it works great with Windows Server 2003" and I may give it four out of five stars. My review would be based on my needs, and my needs are for single picture upload/download archive and long-term archive for personal correspondence/small word documents.

BTW, the SC101 takes two IDE drives, offers RAID 0 or RAID 1, and simply appears as a drive on my Windows Server machine without any effort beyond installing the driver...

Lionel