Netgear SC101 Network Attached Storage for the Home - Down sides
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Let's now look at some of the bad points of the device as unfortunately, there are a few. One of the benefits proclaimed on the packaging is that the device has an infinite capacity, as storage can be expanded indefinitely and it will essentially keep pace with technology indefinitely. I find this hard to believe; PATA is already a legacy interface compared to SATA and now SATA2. PATA drives are going into decline, with prices increasing as production slows. At some point you'll be hard pressed to find a new PATA drive that's worth paying for.
The setup wizard clearly states that if mirroring is not selected as an option now, prior to the drive being formatted initially, it can never be enabled on the drive. If for whatever reason, you just buy one drive to put into the device, you'll need to buy two new drives for it if you ever want to enable this feature. This may be an integral problem with any mirroring setup, I don't know, but in my eyes, it's a down point.
The data transfer speed supported by the device is pretty poor; 100 Mbps is by no means fast, slower in fact than my 108 Mbps wireless router. A network speed of up to 1000 Mbps, by no means unusual, would have been far better; using a faster connection speed or even a SATA interface should have been easily achievable, and would have provided a more future-proof solution. Copying large files to and from the device takes a long time, even if the network isn't being used by other computers.
Occasionally, I see bursts of activity on the storage center and my router, when no computers on the network are accessing it. This could mean that my neighbors have managed to bypass the encryption on my router and are in the process of copying all of my files, or it could be that the device uses a lot of network bandwidth for some process.
The worst thing happened a day after I'd installed it; it was going fine, I'd copied a few gigs worth of data over to it and then suddenly, I couldn't access it any more from my desktop. Also, my desktop started running incredibly slow. I've read some horror stories on Internet forums about the device and read about similar issues. I think the failing, however, was more to do with the computer than with the device; after all, I could still access it from other machines on my network and in all honesty, I've had some issues with my desktop recently anyway. To fix the problem, all I had to do was unmount the device from the desktop and then reconnect to it from the service control manager utility. That fixed the computer slowness and the connection problems. I didn't lose any data and it hasn't happened again since, but I'm still a little paranoid.
Overall, despite its shortcomings, I'm still relatively happy with the SC101; it does exactly what it says on the box, and was in what I would describe as a reasonable price bracket. It has given me a centralized location for storage, which it provides in a secure, albeit slow manner. There are other NAS units that are cheaper, but their features pale in comparison to those of the SC101. There are of course devices available that are more expensive which perhaps are a little more stable or a little quicker. The SC101 is a trade-off between reliability and price. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether it's worth it.
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