All Network attached storage (NAS) Feeds

Buffalo LinkStation Mini 1TB

Dan Grabham — 1209138032

When Buffalo visited the TechRadar offices to show off this product its representatives confessed that they didn’t quite know who would buy the LinkStation Mini. A squashed down version of the company’s very successful LinkStation Live range, the Mini packs in two 500GB 2.5-inch laptop hard drives in a fanless casing.

This makes it uber-quiet but also pretty toasty and a little slow - the drives spin at 5,400rpm rather than the standard 7,200rpm desktop rate. We got a rather paltry 9.2MB per second when transferring data over a standard network connection.

Gigabit Ethernet

The device is boosted by the provision of Gigabit Ethernet – still an expensive commodity it seems - as well as a DLNA media server and support for iTunes; Apple’s software can suck tunes directly off the drive without issue. Gigabit is only worth the effort if you’ve got a router that supports it too.

There’s also a USB port on the rear of the 500g unit for direct copying of USB thumb drives or indeed anything else plugged into the USB port such as a digital camera. Another rear end switch enables the unit to automatically power on and off if required.

Buffalo’s NASNavigator software is much improved and now enables you to map a network drive and check on key drive properties from a single interface. It also makes things easier should you have various LinkStations on your network.

Designed for Mac OS X

However, it’s not exactly fully featured and for full configuration you’ll soon resort to the browser-based interface. Buffalo has also long made good for Mac users too though, and the NASNavigator has also been designed for OS X.

Unless you’d seen the box, you wouldn’t know the LinkStation Mini was any different from any other NAS device. And that’s a little bit of a problem. Storage should be used, not seen. Now, we don’t have anything against the LinkStation Mini per-se. It’s a nice little box, but you’ll need to have a very specific use case in mind for buying it – not least because of the price point the unit is pitched at.

Yep, so it’s £282 RRP won’t be its street price, but at the time of writing it’s still a £150 premium over an external hard drive of that capacity. Mind you, it’s only £30-40 more expensive than the equivalent LinkStation Live product with a full-size 3.5-inch hard drive. That doesn’t seem so bad – providing you actually need your NAS to be portable.

Freecom Storage Gateway WLAN 250GB

tech.co.uk staff — 1205419215

For such a compact little drive, Freecom's new Storage Gateway packs a mighty punch. The styling and finish are excellent, but the most obvious difference between this drive and its main rivals is the antenna that sticks up from the back.

Sure enough, the WLAN version of the Storage Gateway offers full 802.11g (54Mbps) wireless networking thanks to its built-in router, as well as being backwards compatible with 11Mbps "b" wireless standard. On top of that there are three RJ-45 ports for wired Ethernet connection. These aren't Gigabit compatible, only going up to 100Mbps, but that's still fast enough for most home and small business users.

Connection options go further still, with four USB2 ports (two on the front and two on the back), plus a SATA port for attaching a second external drive - slightly surprising considering the built-in drive is an EIDE hard disk.

The final socket is labelled WAN and is used for connecting a DSL modem, after which you can share your broadband connection through all the wired or wirelessly connected PCs on your network. At this point you have to wonder why Freecom didn't build a modem into the Storage Gateway as well, just to complete its all-singing, all-dancing repertoire.

Do it all

Quiet and efficient in use, the Freecom does many tricks. As well as acting as a regular network file server, you can also use it as a secure FTP server over the Internet, a Web server, email server, print server, back-up server and AV server for your audio and video files.

There's also a built-in firewall, cross-platform compatibility for Windows, Mac, Unix and Linux, plus two licences for the bundled Acronis TrueImage back-up software. It's everything you could want for the home or small office.

Linksys Network Storage Link for USB 2.0

tech.co.uk staff — 1205409339

Providing a network bridge between an external disk and a home network is a welcome idea, offering anyone who has already invested in one or more USB storage devices a way to network their files, but Linksys' Storage Link is badly conceived. It's an attractive device; small, ergonomic and easily concealable.

However, a connected drive must be formatted to the Linux EXT2/3 format before use, resulting in the drive's total incompatibility with a Windows PC.

Drives also aren't hot-swappable, going against the very nature of the USB specification, and there's no support for networking a USB printer. The final blow is the Storage Link's lack of a gigabit Ethernet connection. As a result, copying a 1GB in our tests took over five minutes

Iomega Storcenter

tech.co.uk staff — 1204803070

The Storcenter is beautifully compact, enclosing its two drives in a simple, understated solid metal body.

There's support for Gigabit Ethernet, RAID 1 and 0 and uPnP for media streaming, as well as two USB sockets for networking a printer. Disk noise during read/write operations is reasonably high due to the sound resounding through the metal body, but is really only noticeable due to the internal fan's silence.

There's no web interface, so before the drive can be used, Iomega's discovery software needs to be installed on one computer. It's one of the simplest configuration programs we've seen, requiring a single click to locate the disk and map it as a drive in My Computer.

The package installs Automatic Backup Pro, giving file or drive scheduled backup. 1GB of data took two and a half minutes to copy due to the fast gigabit connection, and streaming hi-def video (via a uPnP media streamer) ran over Ethernet.

Data Robotics Drobo

1204717836

Yes, it's an external case for a hard disk, and, yes, it costs £350 without a single drive fitted, but we're still really excited about this product.

To understand why, you have to understand the problems it's here to solve...

The life of a hard disk

A regular external hard disk has a finite capacity and no methods of its own to guard against data loss through drive failure. When it's full, you have to buy a new drive with a higher capacity and copy the data across, or, if it crashes, buy another and hope that your backup regime will have saved your files.

And when you do replace the drive, you have to decide whether to shell out for the highest capacity drives available or go for one a size or two down and risk running into the same problems a few months down the line.

RAID enclosures solve some of these problems. Here, you slot in matching drives and, depending on how you configure the system, you'll have so-called data redundancy; if one drive fails, you can simply pop it out, slot in a replacement, and the RAID box will automatically rebuild the set.

The problem here is that RAID works best if you use identical drives in each bay, and though you could in theory choose to include some higher capacity drives, the final pool of storage you have is defined by the lowest-capacity drive on the system.

Brave new world

Welcome, then, to a new world of storage with Drobo. It has four drive bays and you can slot any capacity and type of drive into any of the four bays; the Drobo automatically gives you as much capacity as possible.

It doesn't use any of the usual RAID flavours; instead, a proprietary data management system moves information around the drives, and a system of traffic lights lets you know the status of your data; it's managed so that if one drive fails, you're still safe - just pop in a replacement.

Set-up is a doddle - a big, simply illustrated sheet in the box takes you through the three-step process. There are no drivers - modern Macs and PCs just see it as a big external hard disk - and a crib sheet fixed to the reverse of the magnetically-attached front face reminds you what the status lights mean.

Hot-swappable

If one of the lights next to a particular drive goes orange, it's 85% full and should be replaced with a higher capacity model, solid red means 95% full, and blinking red means the drive has failed. If they're anything other than green, you can - while the drive is still being accessed - pop the drive out and replace it; the lights will blink as your data is rebuilt.

This hot-swappable, organic-growth system means that the unit has essentially unlimited storage, and you can happily buy 750GB or 500GB drives to get you started rather than punishing your credit card with 1TB units.

We threw in a couple of 1TB Western Digital Green Power drives and some older 750GB and 500GB ones, and it worked just fine. Since it can be formatted as HFS+, it's supported by Time Machine, too.

Pros and cons

But it's not perfect. Performance isn't stellar - using it as a repository for television recordings was occasionally frustrating, thanks to sporadic drop-outs - and there's only a single USB port at the rear. Its fan can get noisy during rebuilding, too.

It's also annoying how the drive reports its capacity to the host computer, although a recent firmware upgrade has helped mitigate this. And if things do go catastrophically wrong, we'd have more confidence in an independent company's ability to recreate data from a vanilla RAID setup than from Data Robotics' data schemes.

But even with these niggles, it's still a fantastic data storage solution, and we want one.

D-Link DNS-323

tech.co.uk staff — 1204647847

The case feels a bit cheap, but once installed, the drives are secure and protected.

The twin-bay setup allows two 750GB hard drives to be installed for 1.5TB in RAID 0 or 750GB of entirely secure RAID 1 data storage.

The Linux installation can operate an FTP, iTunes and uPnP server, and provides print server support via a single USB socket - but this can't be used to connect a mass storage device.

Software is optional, as the drive assigns itself a default IP address. Connecting to the router reveals an attractive web interface, providing control of the drive's settings.

The D-Link is impressive, but the price is steep for an empty enclosure.

FIA On3

tech.co.uk staff — 1204647553

Devices that are designed to bridge the gap between IT and AV equipment are big business.

Until now wireless media adapters have hogged the technological limelight, enabling you to stream content from a PC to a TV via an inconspicuous set-top box. These 'middleman' gadgets work well enough, but they require the host PC or Mac to be constantly switched on. Unless you've got a dedicated system acting as a media server, it's not an ideal solution.

But there is another way. The On3 is one of a new breed of entertainment-focused NAS (network attached storage) devices. FIA's compact blue/silver unit is essentially an 80GB hard disk designed to act as a vault for all your music, video and digital photo files. More importantly, the On3 can also play back or display these files independently of an active PC. With its own built-in GUI and support for a wide array of media formats, this is half 20th century data archive, half 21st century media player.

Despite its NAS origins, the On3 is surprisingly easy to set up. It can be connected directly to a PC/Mac (where it will appear as a network drive) or plugged into a router/switch via a straightforward crossover cable. The supplied software automatically detects the attached On3 box, whereupon all you have to do is assign a manual IP address to the device or let the software suggest an appropriate one for you. The On3 drive is formatted with three pre-defined folders - Music, Photo and Video. Compatible files just need to be dragged and dropped into these folders to be recognised by the On3's software.

For hooking the On3 up to a TV, FIA has incorporated component audio and video outputs (for 1080i and 720p), composite video and audio outputs, plus S-Video, S/PDIF and co-axial audio connections. But the On3 will succeed or fail according to the number of video/audio formats that it supports. Fortunately, it seems to have a clean sweep of video formats, embracing MPEG-2, DivX and MOV files. Audio support extends to MP3, Ogg and AC3, while the On3 can also display JPEGs, GIFs, animated GIFs and PNGs.

In its media player mode, the On3 uses the same web-style interface as Actiontec's Wireless Digital Media Player. And, like the Actiontec device, it offers only barebones playback options. There's no 'resume' for video, for example, and while there's a 'random play' audio option, there's no 'playlist' feature. The badly designed remote doesn't help matters. Responsiveness is poor, while the FF and REW buttons have been squeezed into a cramped button layout.

The On3 is certainly promising, but it feels like an AV gadget designed by IT minds. It's a playback-only system and there's no wireless support in this version. It would have benefited from an optical drive, enabling you to view content on CD or DVD, rather than copy it on to the hard drive. Similarly, we expected a Scart socket on the back, considering the On3's TV-friendly ambitions. Perhaps FIA can implement this later on.

Admittedly, while the On3 is missing key usability features, it proves that such a remote backup device/media server can be a useful addition to a home network.

Microsoft Windows DVD Maker

tech.co.uk staff — 1204562550

DVD Maker is included with Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, or any higher version. Does this mean the other makers of DVD authoring software have something to worry about? Well, not really.

DVD Maker is a basic program for putting video files and digital photographs on to a DVD. In use it's simple, mainly because there are so few options to confuse and it has that typical Windows look to make anyone feel at home. Just select some images or videos and tweak a few settings and it's ready to write to DVD.

Slideshows can have an initial menu screen, either one of a number of predefined menus or using an image provided by you, with a choice of eight different transitions between images.

You can also add background music and change the text styles of menus. That's about it, though. Where it's likely to trip you up is in your choice of video files. DVD Maker is unable to transcode files for you; it needs suitable MPEG-2 files.

This shouldn't be a problem with videos that you transfer from your camcorder (DVD Maker doesn't download from camcorders, but Windows Import Video handles this). However, most AVI files, especially DiVX or MPEG-4 that you download or output from other programs will need to be transcoded first.

DVD Maker isn't intended for that, though. It's for creating DVDs from your own material, and it does this well. Don't expect Windows DVD Maker to be your one-stop shop for DVD authoring.

Roll your own menus

Menus can be customised beyond the 20 standard choices that the program gives you. You can add your own image or video as the menu background and apply an audio track. This is probably all the customisation DVD Maker needs.

Adding more options would make the program more difficult for new users to get to grips with and its simple structure certainly dispenses with the need to read up beforehand. The menus looked good on a standard DVD player (although menu buttons were displaced in the Windows DVD player), but the scenes menu was unresponsive for several seconds before the button highlights appeared.

DVD Maker's achievement is that it's one of the easiest editing suites around, although it's still nothing to write home about. It's a basic program that creates decent DVD videos and slideshows in a short space of time.

Basic isn't necessarily bad, but if you only want minimal features, why should you have to hunt through layers of menus and options to find them? There's a demand for "drop here, click this" DVD authoring, and DVD Maker meets it to some extent.

One problem with the lack of choices is that before long everyone will be giving you DVDs of their holiday snaps, or their children opening Christmas presents, all using exactly the same presentation. Once you know the program, you'll be able to spot a DVD that's been made with DVD Maker a mile off!

If it's included with your copy of Vista, give it a try, but don't be surprised if you start coveting some of the other programs on offer after your first few DVDs. After all, tinkering with videos of family and friends is an addictive hobby!

Data Robotics DroboShare

1203956325

We're excited about the Drobo, but the obvious question to ask is why Data Robotics didn't add Ethernet; with such a large, growing pool of storage in place, it makes sense to have it available to all users on a network.

And so was born the DroboShare, a slim sled that sits underneath a Drobo and gives it an Ethernet port so you can hook it directly to a router for everyone to share.

Easy to use

In keeping with the Drobo's mission to make things simple, the DroboShare is very user-friendly. It's easy to plug in - a neat connector splits the Drobo's single power cable in two - and an Ethernet and short USB cable are included.

If you're used to setting up more sophisticated NAS systems, you might be disappointed, as there's no provision for user- or group-level access privileges, but then again for those attracted to the Drobo system, open access or the single username/password authentication option provided should suffice.

The Drobo Dashboard software allows for the same management as if the drive were mounted over USB, and indeed one of the system's charms is that you can switch back and forth between USB and LAN connections to suit your needs. You can even have the drive formatted as HFS+ when shared.

Pricey option

Once it's set up, in theory you don't need to install the Dashboard on the other computers on the network, but we found that discovery of the drive was a bit hit and miss without it.

One caveat: the price. The AirPort Extreme Base Station (£61 cheaper) is even highlighted in the Drobo's manual as an alternative to the DroboShare, and it includes an 802.11n router; spec up a Drobo with 1TB drives and a DroboShare and it'll set you back £850.

A 1TB Time Capsule costs only £329 - while this doesn't include the Drobo's data redundancy, it does at least work with Time Machine.

D-Link DNS-323

tech.co.uk staff — 1170324055

The DNS-323 from D-Link enables you to make your own network-attached storage device. We say 'make' because this is only an enclosure and doesn't come supplied with any drives - you have to buy them separately. Extra storage space is always welcome, but if the thought of rolling your own with something like this doesn't fill you with confidence, think again.

The DNS-323 takes SATA drives, installing them is simple. Lift off the front of the chassis, make sure that the drive is the right way round (the ports line up with the connectors) and slide the drive in.

Give each drive a gentle push to locate the ports and you're done. Similar enclosures are available for PATA drives, but they aren't as straightforward as this. With the drives in place, the next step is to plug in the power and connect it to your network.

Unfortunately, setting the drive up posed more of a problem. The manual isn't as helpful as it could be. All it says is that you should connect the Ethernet cable to the drive and then to your network, or directly to your PC for configuration.

When we tried this nothing happened initially. So with the network cable connected, we turned the drive off and on again. After a few minutes the drive appeared in the detection software.

Although the software states that you can then map the drives inside the device, we had no luck with this, despite following the manual. We also had problems configuring the drive. According to the drive's literature you can set it up as either as a RAID 0 or 1 device, or as two standard drives.

One other feature is the USB port on the chassis. This means that you can connect a USB printer to it and then share it over your network. This is useful to have, but not essential.

The problems with the configuration spoil what's otherwise a useful piece of kit. If this is the sort of thing you're after, there are better examples available elsewhere.