Micronet MDN1000 Fantom Drives G-force MegaDisk NAS/RAID 1 TB Ethernet Storage with Shadow Backup

List Price: $0.00 Discount Price: $273.10

Features:

• NAS RAID solution offers dual SATA2-NCQ-enabled disk mechanisms, dual USB expansion ports, and a gigabit Ethernet network connection
• CIFS/SMB NFS and FTP connectivity, USB external disk (via two USB expansion slots), printer sharing, iTunes server, and unattended bittorrent download manager
• Supports robust RAID disk configurations including RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD, and SPAN
• NTI Shadow software offers real-time continuous backup
• 1-year limited warranty

Customer Reviews:

Outstanding Value - Excellent Product [Posted on 2007-12-29]
This is a phenominal NAS drive. It's very high quality and sturdily built, and works like a charm. It has a somewhat confusing user unterface, but this is still the best value on the market for NAS drives.

1 TB for less than $500!!!!

Shipping was quicker than expected, and the drive was very well-packaged!

I had high hopes [Posted on 2008-02-18]
In October 2007 was in the market for an inexpensive solution to store a large collection of documents, ebooks and family digital photos. This unit looked interesting and was the right price, so I bought it with my fingers crossed. It performed this task laudably for a few months until the fan got very noisy and started to have intermittent problems spinning up to dissipate the heat.

Hoping to head off problems, I put in a request at Fantom's tech support site to ask if they would like to send just a replacement fan or should I get a replacement unit, and if I can get one shipped and then return the other unit the next day once I've rescued the data from the unit which I now have powered down. Unfortunately, I have heard nothing from them after a week and a half, and have concluded that I probably won't be hearing from them.

I now realize I should have gone with my gut and built out a low-power server myself rather than depending on this unit to safeguard data that's important to me. Once I move this data off the unit, I suspect I'll use it for experimentation rather than as an personal file server. Thanks for nothing, Fantom!

Oh, one more gotcha: even if you turn off the DHCP server on the unit, it will turn itself on if it loses its IP address. This means if you disconnect it from your network or power cycle the switch or router that you have it plugged into it may re-enable the one on board, giving you an extra rogue DHCP server on your network. This can cause all sorts of problems on your network (we routinely threaten to have people at my office shot if they plug something in that has a DHCP server embedded because it causes a LOT of support calls until we track the offender down), and isn't worth the headache.

To resolve this sort of behavior, make sure you power down the unit before disconnecting and reconnecting it to your network or power-cycling the networking device it's attached to. It'll save you headaches in the long run.

You get what you pay for . . . [Posted on 2008-03-21]
I knew when I put this extravagantly named device on my wish list that I was taking a risk. For under $500, the device contains to 500 GB drives, configurable as a single 1 TB volume or a mirrored 500 GB volume, is network-attached, and has a USB port for additional drives. The catch is that not a lot of quality control went into the device. When I first fired it up, I chose to reconfigure the drives from the default 1 TB to the mirrored configuration, which requires the drives to be reformatted. That process was easy enough to initiate, but it then got stuck at around 70% and ceased updating the Web management interface. I restarted it, had the same thing happen, fired off an email to tech support, then tried it again. Fortunately, third time was a charm, because I didn't hear back from support for over two months.

Other minor complaints:
* There is no soft power-down option on my unit, so I have to crawl under my desk to turn it off, even though there's a "Turn off" option in the management interface . . .
* . . . and I need to turn it off when it's not being used, because the fans are incredibly noisy, and the status LED's are sufficiently bright to act as a night-light.
* Even though the device is clearly Linux-based and hence is probably running Samba, I can't conceal file shares by appending a $ to the share name.

I recommend this device for the tech-savvy penny-pincher who is willing to take a chance to save some money and doesn't mind a few annoyances. Anyone else should probably just shell out for a higher-end unit.

Astonishingly unreliable NAS [Posted on 2008-07-03]
I've had this thing for over a year. Six times I've been convinced it's cooked off a drive because it vanishes from the network and won't get back on. Each time it's just the NAS climbing a tree. Shares don't work. iTunes sharing doesn't work. It's a horrible print server. Tech support is completely unavailable - I once wrote them a "I can't get at my data please help!" email and they got back to me six months later. They've pushed a firmware update that doesn't work at all. They don't answer the phone. This is an awful product from an awful company and there are *no* solutions that wouldn't be better. Avoid like the plague.

Inexpensive But Unreliable [Posted on 2008-07-31]
A Review of the Micronet MDN1000 Fantom Drives G-Force MegaDisk NAS

With a name like that, how can you go wrong? Well, I've now owned two of these little NASs within the span of one year, and I'm about to get a third one, but I haven't had multiple copies because I like this thing...

My first unit was broken right out of the box; its networking hardware was faulty. How I wish that I had simply returned the MDN1000 for a refund rather than doing what I did, which was to get a replacement.

The second one was fully functional out of the box, and I was generally pleased with how easy it was to setup on my home network. Plugged into the wireless router, it provided a nice way to move files around among various computers and store / share my iTunes library. I found its performance to be satisfactory.

However, the device always ran hot, and from the day the drive was first powered on, the noisy little fan on the back ran incessantly. After several months, the little fan STOPPED running incessantly, and when the fan was off, the device became almost too hot to touch. Predictably, it failed (this week) about two months after the fan operation became intermittent.

My drive is still under the 1-year warranty. My contact with the company's tech support people has, so far, been positive; after I reported my problem via email, they emailed back within 24 hours with some basic questions, and my answers convinced them (as I am convinced) that this was a hardware failure. My NAS is on its way back to them now for a warranty repair / replacement.

I would only select this drive if price is overwhelmingly the most important factor in your NAS buying decision. At most, I would recommend it only for occasional home use, not for business or any other "constant on" application. Even for home use, I would only use it for storage of files that are not of great importance and that are routinely backed up to other media. (Don't keep your family photos on this without backing them up somewhere else!) If you buy one, do your best to keep it cool, and return it for repair at the first sign that the fan is going bad.

However, the frustration that I (along with many others - read the other user reviews that you can find through search engines) have had with this thing makes me wish that I had never bought one, and I would recommend that you buy something else as well. Although inexpensive, this device is not a bargain. One star.

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