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(More customer reviews)This product is one of a number of network attached storage (NAS) devices on the market targeted at small offices and home users. If you're not familiar with NAS devices, the concept is simple: A NAS device contains one or more hard drives and plugs directly into your network (i.e., your router). When compared to simple USB hard drives that plug directly into a computer, a NAS offers a number of advantages:
1) It is accessible to any computer on your network. This is convenient at home, since you can use the NAS as a central repository for files (documents, photos, music files, etc.) that you might want to access from any of a number of different PCs. In a small office, having a central storage location for key files (client documents, contact lists, etc.) can be critical.
2) In principle, you could achieve the same benefit by attaching a big USB drive to one PC, setting that PC up to share its files, then leaving that PC on all the time. But these NAS devices are better optimized for file sharing, use far less energy, and take up far less space than a full PC.
3) Most of these NAS devices have something called RAID. They have (or allow you to install) multiple hard drives in the same unit, then they write every bit of data to multiple drives. This way, if one drive fails (as they are prone to do), the NAS can automatically switch over to the other drive and you don't lose any data. One HUGE warning, though - RAID only protects you from drive failure. NAS devices still have plenty of "single points of failure," including the power supply, controller, etc. I lost all of my data on a LaCie Network Disk because of a software glitch in the unit, even though all the individual drivers were fine. RAID reduces your risk of losing files, but it does not eliminate it.
4) Because the NAS is always available to any PC on the network, it's a great solution for backing up individual PCs, in addition to operating as a file server.
I am currently using a number of different NAS products in both my small business and my home. Here is a summary of the pros and cons of the three models I am currently using: Netgear's ReadyNAS Duo, EMC Iomega's ix2, and LaCie's Ethernet Disk RAID NAS. I'll call out only areas in which I see significant differences between the products. Also, this review is intended mainly for small office users - the features you might care about for a home NAS are likely to be different (e.g., you'd probably care about how well it works as an iTunes library or for streaming movies, neither of which is key in our office setting). Here goes:
1) Netgear ReadyNAS Duo. This is a smaller, two-drive version of Netgear's ReadyNAS product (originally developed by a company called Infrant, which Netgear acquired). It takes up very little space, uses relatively little power, and is fairly quiet. Reads and writes to this device are very fast, which is important when running backups. The ReadyNAS has a particularly robust feature set when it comes to backing up the NAS to another device on the network. This is important, since even with RAID, it's possible that the whole device will fail (e.g., if the power supply goes bad), so you want to make sure you back up your NAS regularly. Setup isn't hard, but you have to know what you're doing - this device is clearly targeted at somewhat technical users who know the terminology and are willing to work through all the configuration menus. This is our primary file server in our office, and it has been a reliable workhorse. About once every 2-3 months, I need to log on to fix something that has glitched - other than that, the ReadyNAS Duo has required no effort beyond setup. It's one of the best small NAS products I've used.
2) Iomega ix2. Iomega is now owned by EMC, the company that creates the monster-sized storage devices for big corporations. The ix2 is incredibly small - it takes up about as much space as a tape dispenser. Of the small office NAS products I've installed, it has the easiest setup - the configuration menus aren't quite Mac-like, but they're the closest of any NAS I've used. The ix2 does the best job of setting up multiple users - it automatically creates private folders for each user and makes it very easy to control permissions to shared folders. The ix2 is by far and away the lowest cost NAS I've used, at under $200 for a 1TB configuration. The ix2 comes with two drives preinstalled, but the drives are not user replaceable; I would have liked replaceable drives, but I'm willing to live with this tradeoff since it yields a very small and cheap unit. (Some users think non-replaceable drives are a show stopper. Personally, I'm just counting on my RAID to prevent loss of files if a drive fails. If a drive does fail, I'm more likely to replace the whole NAS, given the rate at which features are improving and prices are dropping, rather than just replacing the drive.) The ix2 excels as a backup solution for PCs - it comes with software to automatically backup any PC on the network to the devices. One important missing feature, though, is the ability to back up the NAS to another storage device on your network - this is very important in an office setting if you are using the NAS as your primary file server, rather than as a backup for your PCs. Because of this missing feature, we use the ix2 as our backup storage device, not as our primary file server. The ix2 has proved highly reliable and trouble free - like the ReadyNAS Duo, it runs for months at a time without anybody having to tweak anything.
3) LaCie 301160U 1TB Ethernet Disk RAID Network Attached Storage. If you've gotten the impression that I love the ReadyNAS Duo and ix2, you're right. Balancing the cosmic scales is the LaCie Ethernet Disk, which caused us nothing but headaches. The LaCie NAS configuration menus are opaque, even to a reasonably knowledgeable person. The device is hard for users to find on the network. The device is painfully slow - backing up large numbers of files to or from the device takes forever. It does not come with software to back up PCs to the device, and it lacks the feature to back itself up to other devices. It's big and noisy. And, most importantly, it's unreliable. On multiple occasions, the device simply disappeared from the network, forcing us to reset the device (which takes a while). The last time this happened, the device couldn't read its hard drives when it rebooted. I spent hours with LaCie tech support, but nothing worked. We ended up losing ALL of the files on the device. LaCie ended up replacing the device, but that didn't save our data. Having read other reviews with similar complaints, I know my experience wasn't a fluke. This is not a reliable product.4) HP MediaVault. I have a MediaVault 2100 installed at home, and I really like it. It has more consumer-oriented configuration and usage menus than the products reviewed above. It also does a nifty job of handling media files, which is more important at home. In particular, it works as a great central iTunes library, automatically sweeping music files from my individual PCs up to a central shared folder on the NAS. The individual PCs in turn can then access the NAS folder (as if it were an attached iPod). This means that everybody in the house has access to any songs anybody else has downloaded. I tried using the MediaVault briefly in our office, but it didn't work nearly as well as the ReadyNAS or ix2. It wasn't fast enough and (true to its name) the setup options seem clearly designed for a home multimedia environment rather than an office file environment.
5) Buffalo. I haven't used a Buffalo NAS since I installed the Netgear ReadyNAS and EMC/Iomega ix2 devices, so I can't offer an up-to-date comparison. The Buffalo device that I replaced was OK, but it wasn't nearly as fast, compact, or feature rich as the Netgear and Iomega products.
In a nutshell, I've been very pleased with my Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and Iomega ix2 in the office, and with my HP MediaVault at home. The LaCie NAS was very bad, and the Buffalo products I've used have been OK but usually not the best in class. I hope this helps.
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