Thursday, March 25, 2010

Network Storage for Cheap!

Just picked up these too from my local Aldi


The HDD was €79.99 and the hub was €49.99. For the longest time I've been wanting a NAS solution. Since my dream one is slightly vaunted and unattainable at present due to budget constraints. But this was cheap and looked okay. Either way I have an external 1TB HDD if it all goes south, and they always come in handy.

The Installation was disappointingly simple, insert the CD, install the software, connect via ethernet cable, log into hub, connect it tp your network and your done. Plug in a USB device and from there coftware choice which ones you want to connect and there you go.

Now its not all rainbows and teddy bears. Its not proper NAS, only one user can be connected to a specific USB device at a time, so if you got you photos and music on same HDD and granny wants to look at photos and you want to listen to music and are at different computers it aint gonna happen, and it has WPS option (good idea in theory but never really works correctly in my experience)

Thet wireless Hub has some pretty basic features, Station or Access Point mode, Esssentially Station mode if you have a existing wireless network The other one if you do not. Lanaguages English or German, Set IP and thats about it. File transfer is a little slower that I had hoped but not unworkably slow, I transfered a 1.26 GB file in a little under seven minutes.

The HDD doesn't require explanation is has an eSata port which is nice, but the Hub Doesn't. It seems a little loud but thats probably just my imagination since it's sitting beside me, Wont notice it when its on a shelf. One note I feel I should mention is that it comes formated in FAT32(pretty much standard) But at 1TB in size your losing about 70 GB in storage, so reformatting in NTFS or exFAT or anything else is advisable.

All in all its pretty good it has four USB ports, so its expandable to other devices. Im happy with the purchase and im sure it will serve its purpose for a long time to come and would recommend it to all.



2 comments:

  1. Hi there Rigas, I went out and got the same, one problem, i found that the hub looses its connection if you power down and power up again, did you find this on tour hub?

    regards

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  2. No Martin mine seems fine. I initially set mine up in the living room to get it working, Then unplugged everything and moved to where its going to be set up and it reconnected fine. With my network I have no authentication and MAC address filtering. Slightly different than a "standard" set up. Maybe its having trouble authenticating when its powered back on again?

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