Linksys Network Storage System with 2 Bays (NAS200)

List Price: $179.48 Discount Price: Too low to display

Features:

• Ethernet connected network storage with two available SATA hard drive bays adds shared storage directly to your network
• Add even more storage with two USB 2.0 ports for hard drive or flash USB storage devices
• Securely share files locally or through the Internet (FTP, HTTP) with no dedicated PC needed
• Advanced backup software included
• Built-in media server for streaming to PC or UPnP AV digital media adapter

Customer Reviews:

Just what our busy home network needed! [Posted on 2008-04-04]
I read alot of pretty negative reviews of the NAS 200 but decided to buy it anyway. My experience with this product has been entirely positive. I owned the earlier 'SLUG' model from Linksys and the NAS 200 is a massive improvement.

Many of the reviews talk about how slow the NAS 200 is at uploading/downloading. Personally I just don't notice it as a problem. In fact it seems pretty fast to me. My primary interest was to install a RAID 1 backup server with good FTP server access so I could easily get to my files while on the road. I dropped two 500 GB SATA drives into the unit and configured RAID 1 giving me around 450GB of storage with the comfort that if either drive fails, I can replace it and not lose any data.

The FTP server function seems to work well. I configured all the computers in the house to be able to easily connect to the NAS 200 through Windows Explorer and I setup the free (1 year) Dynamic DNS service so I can navigate to the NAS 200 from anywhere I can get internet access.

Note that getting access to the NAS from the internet will require you to configure internal "Port Forwarding" on your NAT home router. I think the unit comes with instructions for setting this up on the Linksys WRT54G. In any case, you will need to forward port 20 traffic. Make sure you understand how to setup 'strong' passwords or every nut on the the internet will gain access to your NAS 200!

Overall, I am very happy with this product. As some may have mentioned the cooling fans are a bit loud so you may want to find an out of the way corner where you have cat 5 internet cable access to your NAT where it can sit and "hum".

The one thing I felt this unit should have offered was a Print Server function on one of the two USB ports. It doesn't.

Bonus info 1: note that the NAS 200 does not support NTFS on the internal SATA drives. You can however add USB drives that are already formatted in NTFS and it will work fine.

Bonus info 2; you cannot control who gets access to the data on the USB drives. In effect when you add a USB drive it becomes 'Public' for all registered users to read/write.

Cheap Price, Cheap performance [Posted on 2008-04-06]
I researched a lot of home NAS devices, and eventually decieded based on price. This unit was the cheapest, and had the funtionality I needed.
However, performance was very poor, probalby due to the low power CPU the unit has.

A unit like this would be great for storing backups, etc (items you dont use very often), but for music/video/sentralized storage, I'd NOT recommend this produnt.

Slooooooooooooowww [Posted on 2008-06-05]
If you want to store data and not care how long it takes to retrieve...or if you want to transfer data at modem speeds this is for you.

I returned mine.

Quirks Make It Less Useful Than Expected [Posted on 2008-06-27]
I bought this to provide RAID 1 backup storage for our entire home, have a central location for email access and other user files, and to be a network server for my external USB drives. While I was able to get the unit running, there were a few hitches that I would have liked to know prior to purchase:

1) The unit access is slow. Many people have mentioned this before but I thought it was just for large file transfers, which I could have lived with. Just accessing the drive, though, is painful. For example, when I try to access the drive in Vista it takes 30-45 seconds before the drive comes up. Very annoying. I was going to transfer all user folders (Desktop, Documents, etc) to the NAS200 but I would expect system performance to grind to a halt if I had to wait for access each time I changed the desktop or edited documents. I'll probably just move the Pictures and Downloads folders out to the drive for now.

2) The USB ports only support read-only access if the external drive is formatted to NTFS. Why they wouldn't make the unit capable of writing to NTFS drives is beyond me. Since I couldn't find this shortcoming in the manual I did some research and found that to write to USB drives they have to be pre-existing FAT/FAT32 drives or formatted by the NAS200 (it formats to FAT32). Since I have 1.5 TB of storage on two external USB drive arrays formatted to NTFS having to empty, reformat, then copy back to the drives is a major undertaking.

After finding these things out I'm now looking for another storage solution for my primary network storage device and will plug my two USB arrays into that. I'll then end up using my NAS200 for secondary storage of critical items or folders that are not accessed frequently. If I get any other external drives, I can then use the NAS200 to format those. I know that some groups out there are working on hacks like they have for the NSLU2 but I prefer my products to work out of the box and not require me to rewrite the firmware to get them to work right.

Reliable [Posted on 2008-07-23]
I battled a bit with this product at first then realized it was my network causing the problem not the NAS200. I have a RAID 1 with 2 500GB drives & 2 USB drives on it and I am vary happy with the speeds I see. I use the web access to get to my files off the internet which is really nice. Only suggestion, put it on a UPS. It does not like power failures...

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