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Worked well, easy to set up. It does not come with drives, I used two 1Tb Seagate drives in RAID 1 (mirror). Showed up on my LAN instantly and all the Windows PC's could see it first time tried.So far, it's been running 1 month, zero problems. It looked like a Disco in there. For newbies, takes some getting used to. I had mine up and running within minutes, although I did spend an hour or two tweaking all the settings, IP address, etc. I bought this device to consolidate all the data on my home office pc's. It was lighting up the whole office at night, blinking constantly.
Finally, the "on" switch is inside the front cover. My network is all 100bt @ about 8to 12Mbyte/sec transfer rate, the device had no problem at all keeping up.Cons: The LED's on the front are VERY BRIGHT. The first time I had to turn it off and on, I had to consult the manual. It does take about 8 to 10 seconds to get fully up to speed, so there is a noticeable lag when you access it out of standby. If you are familiar with browser-interface type admin, you'll easily figure this one out. I pulled the front cover off and covered up the led's with some stick-on window tinting material to soften it up.
I enabled the sleep function that powers down the drives, set it to 30mins. After that, it is fast. Also, this thing runs somewhat hot, it only has one little fan, so keep it out in the open for airflow, do not cover it up. It would have been nice to have a switch on the outside in the back.
I was a bit worried about the Xbox streaming as I had read about difficulties in the internet, but nothing to worry about for my setup, which was a basic home wired network. Easy to setup. Very nice little unit. The only thing I didn't like was the blue LED which is bright, and NEVER turns off, even when the drives power down.One more thing, this unit is SMALLER than it looks in the pics. Easy to install. Unit works well, as well as the uPNP streaming to Xbox 360 (which works out of the box with the standard setup). I think they would sell a lot more if they put a coffee mug next to the advertising picture to give a sense of scale. Very nice design and solid construction.
I also had to set it as static IP for 7 to see it.I have a Netgear 108mbs router with three computers and printer hanging off of it at any given time, all of them connect wireless. It took me about three days to upload 300GB of data wireless so keep this in mind if you have lots of data and can only connect wireless.For a test I connected hard wired laptop and was able to transfer close to 30GB in about an hour. I had to install XP drivers to get it to display on XP. I was looking at a NAS server for a few months to hold my digital media. It is a bit noisy overall, we keep ours inside a cabinet so poor ventilation but you can not hear it either. Upload times are just very slow but this more fault of my setup then the NAS.
Uses about 10-20% network utilization.
The printer and one computer can only run at 54mbs so it has to clock down the router.
The NAS 'shuts down' under no load.
It has meet these needs with a 2TB ran in RAID0 with two WD drives.Had a bit of an issue getting it to read as network drive.
I estimate transfer rates at around 20-30mbs.The NAS runs the fan under high load and keeps the temperature at 111F.
When uploading to the NAS under a full network load I get 1.5mbs.
When streaming wireless from the NAS music/video it works flawlessly.
Acceptable performance for the WD HDD in it.
The NAS is a bargain at the price and works as stated.
Hard Drive works great. Print server works great on printer but does not support scanner on all in one units
Comes with great backup software. Hopefully in the future with better firmware this will be fixed and the USB port may be used for other purposes.2. For raid 1, I found that the current 1.06 and beta 1.08 firmware cause high disk usage for some reason and doesn't "sleep" the hard drives when configured to. savy you can figure it out.The Ugly:1. Internet user/developer groups for this device. System firmware is configurable and if you are adventurous you can customize the Linux operation system.
(Hopefully somebody with know how will write a better "firmware" than the one it comes with).3. The FTP server seems to work well but I don't have no use for it.4. The good:1. This feature I haven't spent time to figure out yet. Out of the box this feature is not worth it. Poor documentation, but if your I.T. It hangs on the configuration in firmware 1.06, but firmware 1.08 will have some improvements.
If your buying this over the cheaper model that has no USB port you may be interested in knowing the USB Print server is slowwwwwwww. A very good backup solution for home.2. I replaced firmware 1.06 with 1.05 and that seemed to correct that issue.2. There is a DNS-323 vista desktop component "gadget" out there that works well with this.The Bad:1. I'm researching why. The I-Tunes feature seems to work only with firmware 1.05. when working.Overall:Very good "Home" NAS for the money.
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