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NETGEAR SC101 Storage Central | List Price: $79.99
Discount Price: $40.00
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Brand: Netgear
Binding: Electronics
Warranty: 1 year warranty
Features: - Network storage device lets you share up to two hard drives over a network
- 10/100 Mbps ethernet connection for speedy data transmission
- Allows for drive mirroring or spanning
- Backed by a 1-year warranty
- Device measures 4.25 x 5.66 x 6.75 inches (WxHxD)
Horrible execution on this product [Posted on 2008-07-11]
For what you pay, you'd expect something from this device.
Performance? Nope.
Reliability? Not here.
Flexibility? Not happening.
Not only is this device only readable by Windows systems (eliminating the utility as a media server for your ps3, wii, or 360), but the proprietary software that is used to format/access the device is horribly buggy and prone to crashing.
This product feels like it was shipped during an Alpha stage and the firmware releases have barely brought it up to Beta.
Also be forewarned: YOU CAN NOT RECOVER INFORMATION FROM A DEAD DRIVE ON THIS!
I just had one of my HD's go out (one of the reasons I like RAID is recoverability). Unfortunately, it won't boot while the dead drive is in, and it seems to be getting stuck on boot up without the dead drive. Maybe they're both dead you say? After swapping both (one at a time in all possible configurations), I finally accepted the data loss and tried the drives in my desktop. Both run though a good hard stress test with no errors. Part of my job is hardware testing, and I would never have put this piece of garbage into consumer hands...is there a lemon law for something like this?!?!
Sufficient but not superior [Posted on 2008-07-21]
I need something to back up all of my home office files. I want something that will serve up movies and music to my entire network. File backup - check...serve up music - sorta...serve up movies - don't bother. In fact, I bought a USB drive for music and movies and just drag it around when needed. The software was a joke when I bought it and it has not gotten much better. I thought I lost everything twice during firmware flashes. I now own (yet another) 500 GB USB drive that I keep in my fire safe and perform bi-monthly backups of the backup. My purposes would have been better served with 2 500 GB USB drives since the "NAS" aspect of music and movie streaming is not really met. Live and learn.
Stay away from this product [Posted on 2008-08-02]
I've tried for over a year on and off to get this thing to work.
Every error I've gotten is mirrored by hundreds of other owners on the support forums.
Someone should initiate a class action suit against Netgear for relasing this product on an unsuspecting public.
It deserves 0 stars, but that option is not provided by Amazon.
Unmitigated disaster (or: should have listened to 80% of reviewers a long time ago) [Posted on 2008-08-13]
NetGear typically makes decent products. Not this one.
There have been longstanding and widely reported problems, many of which are crippling under Vista. One example are transfer speeds which slow to such a crawl that Vista locks up. Only hard boots help. Similar issues existed under XP (ironically less so which is actually a Vista file copy issue).
My SC101 has effectively become un-usuable. With both drives being full I have to delete backup files (anywhere from 5-50 GB). The only way to do so is to break down delete processes into small increments of 50-100 MB to avoid above.
Otherwise slow overall, drive attachment could be much easier, and support is found in user groups but not from NetGear.
Good NAS backup drives starts at around $ 150, a good - and large - basic external hard drive via UBS can be had for well under $ 100.
Decent Hard, Not Very Good Software, Bad for Bandwidth [Posted on 2008-08-27]
I put one of these units in a small medical office as a remedy to issues they were having with adhoc networking on office files. Basically they had established server applications that covered the practitioners documentation, billing the various insurance companies, billing the government, and billing individuals. These things all need special treatment under HIPPA while things like employee handbooks did not, hence a device like this might work. They had been using file sharing under windows with shortcuts to folders but as more people came into the picture and the practice grew user error grew and that just was not working. In a professional environment you just can't use a sneakernet either :) (a flash drive and a pair of Nikes these days)
So being a compact unit I stuck down behind where the receptionist kept her printer paper after chasing off the dust bunnies and connected it to the 24 node Cisco router that sat right by the VPN to the satelites.
First of all as noted it requires a software install on each desktop. For this environment that wasn't all bad as there was a wide variance in user experience and it was not necessarily going to be realistic for them to use a file manager to open stuff up etc. I set everything up and ran all the installs after hours one day and the next began explaining the new icon on their desktops that accessed a space larger than their own computer.
That actually worked really well if it hadn't been sharing space on the main network. That network was a standard Ethernet setup with one wireless connection and when the new storage unit was in use it somehow created a significant reduction in overall network capacity. As noted elsewhere it was pretty slow as well but for our team using it that was not a problem. The problem was in the practitioner's connection to their server as well as billing which combined is your bread and butter of course.
Numerically speaking the office staff at the site outnumbered the practitioner's and the billing stuff only ran on certain days in prepared batches. It's my thought that the software used to connect a user to this unit when used in a number of desktops as few as 6 at a time was creating the drag. Just having it open and moments after it was closed even.
When you add to that the separate VPN installation this thing was proving a bandwidth hog. One little box perhaps or a device purported to serve this purpose?
My opinion is that there are far better solutions out there today and that this unit was flawed from inception by it's propriety software. I never figured out exactly what happened in that case but for those familiar with networking layers I would hypothesize this was really created for one or two PCs and not a small office as suggested in it's literature at the time. Somehow it was clogging on one of the seven layers or creating interference by flooding the network with packets.
Even with as six users and not all them actively using it. What are you going to do ask the supervisor to count heads on who's connected and issue a hall pass?
When I removed it and watched the traffic they were back to having a fairly constant surplus in bandwidth even with the remote nodes. I recommended just adding a redundant server that could be a file server and backup server as well as having in place their bread in butter apps should they need to move to it.
Redundancy is good, it worked much better (the existing server became redundant, while the practitioners got a new faster one rectifying some dissatisfaction. At the same time the boss got to try a cheaper solution which alas was this unit).
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