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Average user rating:
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Full user review
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1 out of 2 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"Drive is great if you're looking for a budget SAN"
Pros: Super High performance, Multiple machine access, Don't need to store nearby
Cons: Weak OSX support, partitioning support is minimal
Summary: I've read a lot of very negative reviews of this drive from people who have simply not understood what this drive is about, so this is my attempt to write a counter opinion.
Firstly, do not buy this drive if you're looking for a USB drive. It will work fine, but you'll be wasting money buying things you don't need. Also, you'd be better getting a drive which is designed to work well in a USB setting (tidy power cord, etc).
Secondly, and less well understood, this drive is NOT a NAS drive. You plug this in and access it over the network, and you plug a NAS drive in and access it over the network, so what's the difference? The difference is where the smarts are kept. In a NAS drive, the logic is put on the drive which gives low performances but really high compatibility. Also, fancy features (e.g. iTunes server) are inconceivable on this drive but pretty commonplace in NAS drives.
What this drive does is shift all the fancy I/O logic from the drive to your computer. As a result there are heaps of things you can do with this drive you'd never be able to with a NAS drive (like have decent performance, or format it with a different partition type). The downside is that you're much more dependent on driver quality than you would be if you were using a NAS drive.
If you're using windows, you're pretty much sweet - the drivers are stable and have been for years. If you're using linux, you're also pretty well off - the drivers are new and a little rough, but they work. If you're using Mac OS, things aren't quite so good with only one machine able to write at once - though any number of machines can read. Also, people in a heterogeneous environment should probably steer clear. There is no filesystem in existance which supports multiple access and is available for more than one OS. Also, you can't create partitions to work around this since the driver doesn't support partitions.
Having said that, this drive will allow you to put all your stuff on an external disk, access it from any computer and access it so fast you can hardly tell it isn't built in. Just perfect for expanding the capacity of a laptop, for sharing music, or whatever.
The drive claims to not use IP networking. Assuming this isn't just marketing speak, I guess it means it is using ethernet routing which means cheaper wireless networks might have trouble with it - personally my (pretty cheap) netgear wireless had no trouble, though I usually use wired for performance.
Users coming from an enterprise background will recognise the strong similarity between this drive and a SAN. That comparison is fair, with the drive effectively acting as a SAN but missing most of the features you'd expect in an enterprise product. Think of it as an AoE (ATA over Ethernet) SAN without the pricetag, performance, hotswap, and multiple partition support and you're pretty much dead on. The latest drivers provide remote SMART capability, so you will at least know to do a backup before the drive fails.
Final comment, this is cheaper than most NAS drives, gives ten times their performance on short reads, and works well with linux and windows. If that's what you're looking for, you're going to be very happy. If you're looking for a NAS to share documents in your macintosh workgroup, you're going to be very disappointed.
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