Ranting Canuck

This week I installed a Netgear SC101 Network Attached Storage (NAS) on my home network, with a pair of Seagate ST3250620A 250 Gigabytes hard drives in it. When purchasing this NAS all I wanted an inexpensive unit that I could throw on my network to use as a backup device and to also store pictures on. Before I installed this NAS I stored all the pictures I took on my main computer which was fine expect Heather wanted access to these pictures. Well my computer is password protected and I don’t let anyone have access to it. Not that I don’t trust Heather or people but there is just too many important and sensitive files stored on my computer.

Anyway back to the NAS, for such an inexpensive solution I am really impressed with It. With the Netgear SC101 NAS and two Seagate Hard Drives   I now have a 250 gigabyte mirror array NAS that cost me about $200 Canadian. With the Netgear SC101 you can put whatever size IDE hard drives that you want in it, so I could have made a 1 TB NAS if I wanted to.

Setup of the Netgear SC101 was really simple I just had to connect it to my router and install some software. The software, Netgear Storage Central Manager found the device on my network and in about three minutes I had divided the NAS disk into three partitions. A backup partition of my computer, one for Heather’s and a large shared partition that we can both access, or anyone who has the password. Literally it took me twenty minutes tops to install the two drives and have this NAS on my network.

Performance of the SC101 is more than adequate for home use keeping in mind that it only has 100 megabyte network adapter built into it. Some people would see this as a big deal but I do not see it as an issue a 100 megabyte connection is plenty fast for home use. The Netgear SC101 is not loud at all, it is physically located in Heather’s office and she does not even hear it. Mind you what drives you install in the NAS will have a large effect on load the unit is.

The only thing that I do not like about Netgear SC101 and this is minor complaint is that you have to install Netgears Storage Central Manager on any computer that you wish to access the drive. Not a really big deal but it is annoying, I like to keep programs installed on my computer to a minimal. I have no problems having to install the software to manage the NAS but you really should not have to just to access the disk.

Anyway all in all I extremely happy with the Netgear SC101 and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for inexpensive network storage.

Update April 6, 2008: I have had considerable issues with this device please see this post.