MaximumPC 2005 11

 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005

reviewsTESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

I

f your home office resembles a data

center more than an office, you’re prob-

ably ready for a network attached stor-

age (NAS) unit. That’s essentially a hard

drive enclosure that hooks directly to your

network, giving you and others in your

home a place to store and share files. And

because they’re not much larger than a

hard drive, NAS units are unobtrusive and

can quietly run 24/7 without requiring a file

server that sucks power all day.

—GORDON MAH UNG

MAXTOR SHARED

STORAGE DRIVE

If Maxtor’s Shared Storage Drive seems

like just a longer version of the company’s

external USB 2.0 hard drive, that’s because

it is. In other words, the hard drive enclo-

sure includes a controller board that adds

Ethernet support. OK, it’s not quite that

simple, but you get the gist. In fact, Maxtor

strives to make consumer NAS uncom-

plicated. Plug the device into a network

with DHCP support, insert the CD, and—

wham!—you’re up and running with a shared

drive that any computer on your LAN can

access, with the proper password. The USB

ports let you share a USB printer on your

network, or plug in a USB key or hard drive

for additional network storage.

Unfortunately, none of the NAS units

here support writing to NTFS, only FAT32

or Linux partitions. That’s a problem for

people who want to share data from

an already formatted hard drive. The

Shared Storage’s hard drive has a 300GB

capacity, 7,200rpm spindle speed, and

a 16MB cache.

Performance with

the Shared Storage

wasn’t stellar, but

it was a good deal

better than with the

USB NAS adapters

we tested last year

(September 2004),

which were pain-

fully slow. When

you factor in the

simplicity of getting

set up, the Shared

Storage Drive makes

for an easy, entry-

level way to get network storage.

WESTERN DIGITAL

NETCENTER

If your primary business is selling hard

drives, it doesn’t take long to figure out

that network attached storage is an easy

way to push more product. Hence, WD’s

NetCenter, which uses the company’s

newly minted 320GB 7,200rpm drive. The

drive is comparable to the others here,

but what really determines a NAS unit’s

performance is the controller chip and

network connection.

To be honest, we didn’t expect a sig-

nificant performance differences between

the WD NetCenter and the Maxtor Shared

Storage, because we strongly suspect

that both are based on the same chipset.

And true enough, the two drives turned

out the exact same throughput score in

SiSoft Sandra 2005.

For a more real world test, we also

copied several gigabytes of data to the

device. Here, too, both were virtually

identical, given the margin of error in file

transfer tests. Like the Shared Storage, the

NetCenter was a snap to install.

Our main complaint with the NetCenter,

as with Maxtor’s Shared Storage, is its

backup capabilities. The firmware on our

unit didn’t give us the option to automati-

cally back up the drive’s contents to a sec-

ondary drive hooked up to one of the USB

ports. That’s a shame, as a NAS unit should

have some form of redundancy. Neither the

WD nor Maxtor units support FTP, or any

multimedia streaming formats, either.

Are these horrible deficiencies? Not

when you consider the price and conve-

nience. If you want something more than

a simple hard drive enclosure with a NAS

module soldered onto it, you’ll have to pay

much more for it, as the other two products

here demonstrate.

LINKSYS EFG250

Linksys’ EFG250 is what you’d expect a

NAS unit to look like. Its tall good looks,

front-facing hard drive drawers, and LED

lights tell you something important is going

on in your data center, err, office.

Unfortunately, of the four units we

Let’s Get NAS-ty

Data sharing and backup are just an Ethernet cable away

WD’s NetCenter is priced well but lacks built-in backup

capabilities.

Maxtor’s Shared Storage Drive is slim in

size and features.

$400, http://www.westerndigital.com

7ES4ERN DI'I4AL NE4CEN4ER

WILD BUNCH

Packs 320GB into a quiet

package that fits on a

bookshelf.

BRADY BUNCH

7

Doesn’t allow automatic

backups to another drive.

$400, http://www.maxtor.com

MA84OR SHARED S4ORA'E

RIO BRAVO

Style and simplicity in a tiny

little package.

RIO LOBO^7

No automated backup ability,

and lacks Gigabit Ethernet.