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US Robotics USR8700 Serial ATA 4-Drive Network Attached Storage | List Price: $605.99
Discount Price: $326.99
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Brand: USRobotics
Binding: Electronics
Features: - 4-drive network attached Storage appliance with up to 2 TB of storage and powerful RAID features
- Supports up to four 3.5-inch 500 GB SATA-I hard disks
- Includes a browser-based management features; DiskSafe Express for reliable data protection
- Includes installation CD-ROM, power cord, quick installation guide, Ethernet cable, and DiskSafe Express recovery CD
- 2-year limited warranty
This item just seemed like it should be so much better. [Posted on 2007-02-17]
I bought this item to store data on, but I also wanted to store video files. For example, I wanted to store ripped DVD's on the hard drive that I frequently watch. Maybe some of you reading my review will say that was a stupid idea, but the hard drives are fast, I chose a RAID that did not have a performance hit, and I have a gigabit network. I can currently play a DVD on my Athlon computer and use two other computers to copy files to the same hard drive on that computer and there is no skipping or slowing down AT ALL.
So here's the deal: This thing was so slow that while I was copying a file to it, I could not connect to the device using another computer. So imagine that it was so busy just accepting a file that I was copying that it could not service the request of making itself available to another computer.
Playing a DVD video from it was absolutely never going to work, and it didn't.
It was my experience that doing any two tasks from the unit greatly slowed down the individual performance of each task. And keep in mind, the connecting issue I mentioned above wasn't just a reduction in speed - it was unusable until those files were finished copying. That's really stinky dontcha think? I don't have that problem with a computer that is an Athlon XP 2500, and while you may say "of course you wouldn't have that problem it's a computer!" ... well I can run 5 different tasks off the hard drive on that Athlon computer and not have any discernable slowing down at all. I really think that this unit is the greatest computing idea since the hard drive, but it's ability to handle multiple requests makes this product an absolute bomb.
Great little NAS [Posted on 2007-03-20]
This thing works well. I dropped four 500GB SATAs for 1.5TB RAID5 capacity. It's fairly quiet and unobtrusive, plus you can plug in two USB drives and/or printers and share them out. The HD caddies are great, it has a nice web-interface and you can muck around its mini-Linux back-end if you so choose. Directories that people do not have access to do not show up, which is pretty nice.
My small complaints; the USB drives must be FAT or FAT32 formatted -- NTFS does not work (the back-end is Linux). Surprisingly, ext2/3 get recognized but can't be accessed through the network (and do not auto-mount like their FAT/32 counterparts). The other is that there's no 'fast' array build option (like a quick-format). I had drives I knew were fine; there was no need to set every single block.
The only other issue is that the NAS offers no backup for itself (although you can back up your PCs with the included software); as much as I trust RAID5, I'd still like to be able to have an extra copy of some data somewhere else, and not have to do it manually (for the Linux savvy, tar is limited, and there's no cron).
As for the poster below me with the speed problems, when you first configure drives into the NAS, the software has to 'build' the array -- this can take quite some time (over 24 hours for my 2TB). In that time, you can access the NAS and the shares and everything, but it is S L O W to read/write. I play AVIs and DVD ISO images right off of it and it's smooth.
WARNING - RAID only with "network" drives [Posted on 2008-01-26]
I purchased this unit along with four Western Digital Caviar 500 GB drives. I set it up for RAID 5. It ran fine for a while and then failed catastrophically, taking some irreplaceable files with it. One drive was toasted. I have a long correspondence with USR where they inform me that "desktop" drives are not supported for RAID and will likely fail. They told me I should have known to use "network" drives for RAID. This is not mentioned anywhere in their documentation. They do tout the 8700 as featuring RAID but make no mention of any drive compatibility issues. As this is marketed to people who are likely not system administrators I think this is kind of sleazy.
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