Customer Reviews

Cisco-Linksys Network Storage System with 2 Bays (NAS200)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

The others have said it as well as I can. I agree with almost everything written (except the brief 2 line review that says it stinks). But here is my pro/con/comment report:

Pros: Very easy to setup. Very easy to install SATA drives (no cables, just slide in like a hot-swappable scsi drive). NO CLIENT SOFTWARE needed to map drives (just connect to \\nas200\sharename). Web based configuration so no software needed to manage. Option to power down hard drives after 10/20 minutes of inactivity, then another option to power down internal fan 10/20 minutes AFTER hard drives power down (to allow case to cool, I guess. This option makes the unit completely silent when not in use (this wasn't mentioned in other reviews). Inserting a USB hard drive (even one previously formatted as NTFS) results in instant detection, AND instant default share created (\\nas200\disk_1_1 for USB1). (to remove the usb external drive while the NAS is running press the small eject button next to the appropriate USB port. If you pull the cable or shut down the external drive, the NAS needs to be reset to see ALL shares). RAID1 option for protecting that precious data (it recommends configuring as individual drives, but no way would I do that. Why wouldn't you select RAID1 if available? Protect those precious family pictures, guys!). Small footprint, stacks with other linksys gear (routers, switches, APs, etc). Option to automatically shutdown every day or a given day of week at a set time. As nice as that is, the fact that the drives and then fan shutdown after inactivity makes it quiet and power saving anyway. Smaller and quieter and easier than using a separate computer (if you were considering making a Linux file "server" out of that spare tower case you had lying around). You don't need client software to map drives, however, the included client software, if you choose to install it, is very helpful and makes mapping drives very easy (adds a system tray icon to quickly map/unmap drives). Also, the software lets you attach the external USB drives from the NAS as if they were local USB drives (which I thought was very cool).

Cons: somewhat slow. I did 6GB in 30 minutes, so figure over an hour for 10-12GB of data over the 100Mb network. I think people are expecting too much from FastEthernet. Especially if you are using wireless! Here are the numbers: 100Megabits per second = 12.5megabytes per second = 750megabytes/minute = 45,000megabytes/minute = 44(real)Gigabytes/minute (assume 40 because FastEthernet really only gets around 90Mb/s in real world). So this unit is running around 25Mb instead of 100. But I wouldn't throw it out because of that. Also, if you are on wireless, well then your network is only really going around 12Mb/s at its best (over 802.11g) real world numbers. To display the list of files in an explorer window sometimes takes 10-20 seconds (but sometimes the files pop right up in a few seconds). When you have gigabit file sharing at work, the NAS is excruciatingly slow. No support for usb printer (the SLUG unit that linksys sells, basically this device with only 2 external USB drive support, has an active community writing Linux firmware that adds all kinds of features, including print server and firewall. I wonder if anyone is working on open source firmware for the nas200?). I digress. More cons: no provision to backup internal drives to external drives (another item on my Linux wishlist). For some reason, I thought that was mentioned on the spec sheet. If you pull an external drive, all shares disappear and you have to power cycle the unit. Takes almost 2 minutes to boot up. No option to power down external USB drives after inactivity, so even when the nas200 fan and internal drives shutdown, the external drives are still humming along. Not as feature rich as making a Linux file server out of that spare computer case you have lying around ;-).

Conclusion: I like the unit. I think it's really 3.5 stars. Its a little slow, but quiet and small, and it holds as much as you put in (I got two 320GB SATA drives, $80 each). If the USB ports could be print servers, that would be one less device in my linksys "stack". If the box could automatically backup internal drives to the external USB, that would be a little more peace of mind. I use it as my picture, document, and MP3 primary storage. The raid1 protects my data, and I use external USB drives to backup (but it's combersome because I simply map drive letters to both the internal drives and the external drives, then copy from one to the other. It would be nice if that feature was built-in). Its nice to have a unified file storage system at home, where I have 4 laptops and a desktop (for gaming :-), and to do it for about $300. Considering the small outlay, its worth getting to fool around with. If in the end, the speed is too slow for your home/SOHO network...you are only out $140 (and you can put the SATA drives in your beefy gaming rig).

I read alot of pretty negative reviews of the NAS 200 but decided to buy it anyway. My experience with this product has been entirely positive. I owned the earlier 'SLUG' model from Linksys and the NAS 200 is a massive improvement.

Many of the reviews talk about how slow the NAS 200 is at uploading/downloading. Personally I just don't notice it as a problem. In fact it seems pretty fast to me. My primary interest was to install a RAID 1 backup server with good FTP server access so I could easily get to my files while on the road. I dropped two 500 GB SATA drives into the unit and configured RAID 1 giving me around 450GB of storage with the comfort that if either drive fails, I can replace it and not lose any data.

The FTP server function seems to work well. I configured all the computers in the house to be able to easily connect to the NAS 200 through Windows Explorer and I setup the free (1 year) Dynamic DNS service so I can navigate to the NAS 200 from anywhere I can get internet access.

Note that getting access to the NAS from the internet will require you to configure internal "Port Forwarding" on your NAT home router. I think the unit comes with instructions for setting this up on the Linksys WRT54G. In any case, you will need to forward port 20 traffic. Make sure you understand how to setup 'strong' passwords or every nut on the the internet will gain access to your NAS 200!

Overall, I am very happy with this product. As some may have mentioned the cooling fans are a bit loud so you may want to find an out of the way corner where you have cat 5 internet cable access to your NAT where it can sit and "hum".

The one thing I felt this unit should have offered was a Print Server function on one of the two USB ports. It doesn't.

Bonus info 1: note that the NAS 200 does not support NTFS on the internal SATA drives. You can however add USB drives that are already formatted in NTFS and it will work fine.

Bonus info 2; you cannot control who gets access to the data on the USB drives. In effect when you add a USB drive it becomes 'Public' for all registered users to read/write.

Linksys could not make it any easier to set up this device. The install utility work with Windows Vista, sets up the drives, and automatically maps a network drive. Unfortunately, the transfer speeds are absolutely terrible. Moving 5 files for a total of 5.30GB, from the pc to the NAS200 took just under 40 minutes with an average transfer speed of less than 3.60MB/sec. Since it has a 10/100 interface I knew the theoretical maximum transfer speed was 12.5MB/sec and I was hoping to get somewhere around 8-10MB/sec on writes and reads. But, to get less than 3.60MB/sec is pathetic. Once the files are transferred, the access time before the files will be display is even worse. My 5 files took almost 12 seconds for before they were ready to be accessed.

However, the bright side is if you set up the device using RAID1 and move all your files to the NAS200 in the event something goes wrong and you lose a drive, just take out the busted one and replace it with a new one. I have no idea what the rebuild process is like, but as long as it works I will be satisfied. Also, for the price Amazon is charging it balances out the pro and cons.

I have not tested out the FTP and media server functions. I also have Linksys' WRT350N Wireless-N router that has a USB storage link and media server. It works perfectly for FTP across the internet and media serving to a DLink DSM-510 in my home, so I also expect the NAS200 to work perfectly.

Overall, I have to give it four stars. I would like to give it 3, but I feel the price point is right on the money. Anything more than what is being charge is a pure rip-off. If I were sending and receiving large files on a regular basis, I'd go with something else. Something with a strong CPU and gigabit ethernet connections. Other than for forementioned shortcomings, this is satifactory for collecting small files that accumulation over time.

I bought two of these units. One to use, the other to replace the nightmare first unit, which failed after a couple days

First I will summarize
It is SLOOW as others have mentioned.
We had serious network issues with it which could not be resolved. Folders could not copy to it and the files that did copy could not delete. Trying to resolve this with Linksys support caused the unit to fail. I am not sure whether this was a network issue, or a NAS failure, but either way, we were down, with poor support to try to remedy this situation.
After "updating" the firmware, there was no way to log into it.
Bought a replacement unit, and could not even log into it. I had to reset the machine to be able to log into it.

On the plus side:
Build Quality is Good.
The industrial design is excellent. Two SATA drives pop in very easily. All you have to pay attention to is the ribbon going under the drives. (Be sure to use static straps, LinkSys ignores this, so I must note that static is a good way to reduce your drives life from 5 years to under a year! Shame on LinkSys for this. Many customers will buy and install this in the winter, where static is a huge problem.)

The NAS200 is small. Its got a very nice feel/look to it. The drives get a little too hot it seems to have been designed with 5400RPM drives in mind, I believe, not 7200RPM or faster drives, as they seem to get really hot, especially with sustained usage. I recommend not installing this in a non air-conditioned room if you get hot summers.

Problems:
The default passwords vary. Their published passwords often do not work. Try admin/admin not blank/admin. If that does not work, reset the machine with the hole in the back and try again.

The LinkSys support people are superficially trained and most have never even seen this unit, even the "supervisors" so quality help is difficult to get.

The configuration (CD installer) software was a nice try but not very useful. Its big in dumb pictures to start out, then falls apart when it is time to do the real installing.

You should not require an installer for this, with a little more work on the web interface, it would be so much better to use and configure. The "web interface" to use the NAS200 is crude, it could have descended from Windows 1.0. Actually, it is a poor port of the standard LinkSys router software. They could have done so much better.

I should mention that the NAS200 SHOULD (and does) work in a Mac OS X environment, but Mac's are ignored by LinkSys. I succeeded in using this in a Mac network, but don't ask for support if you do. LinkSys policy is officially no Mac OS X support, and for no other reason than laziness, in my opinion.

The process of using this is fairly complex in a small network office. They really really need better documentation, at least on line!

There is scant attention paid to the possible network issues in the LinkSys documentation, support or any of the online resources. As I point out below, this box can open up a HUGE security hole, which most users will totally miss.

There seems to be a bug in the RAID 1, using the current firmware V3.4R62 . When you move a set of mirrored drives in a NEW box from an old one the drives are no longer mirrored. Further testing would be required than I did before this review, but I don t think this unit creates two identical disks. Either it does not Mirror properly, or the box's firmware does not handle the case properly of moving a set of disks to another machine.

A problem will occur as a result of this Mirror "failure" scenario, is that if you have to reset the firmware on your NAS200, the Mirror breaks I.e, the drives are no longer mirrored, and the second drive shows as unformatted.). LinkSys suppport said there was no way to "fix" the mirror, i.e. rebuild it so the only recourse would be copy all the data off the NAS200 then create the RAID 1, then copy it back. Not very professional.

Another bug we ran into was the web configurator. When you went into the custom settings under system options it did not reliably save the settings, such as the email notification address. I could enter an email address, save, go back, and it was empty. After several tries with each one it eventually took. It might be the problem is you can only make ONE change at a time save before going to the next change.

The interface for setting up users and shared folders is a mystery. Novice Windows users will have no chance at figuring out what to do and why. If you ignore users, the NAS200 will work but it means that you forgo security, and anyone who can log into your network has full file access. (At least my unit was set to allow guest login by default, so anyone can access the NAS200 who is in your network, until you turn this feature off.) Not so good. But I suspect most people will do just that! In my opinion, this was not thought thru by the software designers at all.

If you are selling something for $149 it better be understandable by the kind of people who spend $150 for technology.

I could go on. All in all this will eventually be a great box in a couple years or so. But the project manager needs to eat his own dog food and learn more about quality control. Its a shame a company the size and reputation of Cisco released a product this immature.

I am a zealous collector of movies, ebooks and mp3 files. One of my computers has 6 hard discs and 2.6 TB of storage, and the other has 1.25 TB. I'm always running out of storage space. After a power supply failure on my 2.6 TB machine, (which I initially thought was a bad boot drive) I decided it was time to store my most valued files on another machine.

The NAS-200 with two Seagate 750 GB SATA drives performs this job adequately.

Installation was very simple. The SATA drives insert directly without cables and both drives were installed in just a minute or two. There is a ribbon, much like a battery holder would use, to enable you to remove the drives if you wish.

The power supply is an external box similar to a laptop's power supply.

I set up the drives (as recommended in the manual and software) as two separate drives. You can also just JBOD, RAID 0 or RAID 1. Choosing separate drives doesn't give you the security of RAID mirroring, but if one drive fails you only lose that drive, not both as when you are striping them.

I had a moment of frustration when I couldn't log on as admin. The book and help files say the username is "blank" and password is admin. This didn't work. Like other Linksys products, the username is "admin" and so is the password.

The built in web server gets you to linksys login page where you can log in as any user or as admin. If you can write your own HTML page to replace this, I don't know how to do that.

If you are planning to use this as a stand alone web server, study up a bit first. This is probably not the box to let Grandma log on and get the kid's pictures.

As mentioned in other reviews the transfer rate is slow, but fast enough that you could stream any media that I have. Moving a 20 GB folder of movies will take more than an hour.

I wish it were faster, and I wish the web server were customizable, but the low price, easy configuration, and massive storage make it a bargain. The NAS-200 was $130 delivered, and two 750 GB Seagates were $370 delivered. A total of 1.5 TB for $500.

I'd do it all over again, and maybe I will when 1 TB hard drives drop in price.

Cheap, slow, limited options.

If you are using this for simple backup, it may be a viable option. It lacks gigabit ethernet, but if you aren't using that, maybe that isn't a concern. The processor in it is slow, and they don't have many options. It won't download torrents, or act as an iTunes server. Basically, this unit is for backing up something else, and nothing else.

It also won't back itself up automatically to a different NAS.

So, it will do the job, for not much money, as long as you understand what job it will do.

I read all the reviews about this Linksys Network Storage System with 2 Bays (NAS200) network storage and I decided to try it for myself.

I am reporting back with my findings. I had some House episodes that I converted to mp4 video for ipod. 24 to be exact. My test was 4.97GB of videos.

I copied it from my desktop, to the Linksys Network Storage System with 2 Bays (NAS200) and Linksys Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives NSLU2 with attached 250GB 7200rpm, and the D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure

I did them all one at a time. The times were as follows.
Slowest was the Linksys NAS200 at 23min 35sec,
Middle was the Linksys NSLU2 (USB disks) 22min 8sec
Fastest was the Dlink DNS-323 coming in at 10min 25sec.
That is less than half of the two linksys devices.

I am going to return the Linksys NAS200. I will probably keep the Dlink. The one thing that keeps the Dlink from being perfect for me is not being able to do HTTP file browsing; making it a web server would be nice. I have read the posts about fun_plug, but have been unsuccessful. I will keep searching.

I almost did not buy this based on previous reviews on Amazon and a review from PC Mag that all said the transfer rate was too slow. I installed 2 drives to this thing backed up my laptop and was able to stream video without any lag. The setup was very easy. I installed the drives in under a minute. I then turned it on and connected the device to my network. Once it bootup it quickly got a Dynamic IP address. I did not even need to follow the directions or perform a discovery. The software that comes with it is not required. Once you connect to it via a browser (http://nas200ipaddress) simply format the drives, setup the users and directories can be created. Once that was done I just went directly to the share (\\nas200ipaddress\sharename)and transferred files. I have lots of very large movie files and music on my laptop that I transferred to the NAS200. I could see no difference in playing them locally or from the NAS200. The difference may be that I am not using the software that accompanies the product, while some of the other reviewers may have installed that software.

The one complaint I have about this is during configuration, while moving from option to option, I have to enter the password multiple times. That started to become annoying.

I almost did not buy this based on the previous reviews, but now that I have it and was able to test and use it myself I am very glad I bought this.

This is a great little unit for the price. I was concerned about the review on speed. I agree it is on the slow side when copying data 15 min for 5gb but it will do. I have been able to stream large media files to two separate computers over wireless with no problem.

I was hoping to install 2 1teraabyte hard drives and use JBOD/LVM (two disks one large drive). It seems as if the nas200 cannot accommodate JBOD/LVM over 500 gb. Putting 2 1tb drvies showed up as 1 tb. However if turning on raid 0 (striping), it seems to work just fine. I now have a 2 tb nas drive.

The Linksys NAS 200 does not come with NFS type file sharing support, a critical service for die hard Linux folks. The NAS 200 does however, have FTP services and CIFS services. Not a deal breaker at all.

The easy fix is to install SMBFS for your Linux distribution! For Debian folk its as easy as "sudo apt-get install smbfs"

Then follow the example shown for the mount command like so'

"sudo mount -t cifs //nas200ipaddress/PUBLIC\ DISK /mnt/nas -o username=you"

(The old school smbmount mount type is buggy and was replaced by cifs over a year ago)

Linux folks could also use curlftpfs for ftp mounts. The performance I experienced was buggy with large file transfers causing me to have to drop back to a standard ftp client for large files and bulk transfers. The cifs mount worked fine in all cases.

I took advantage of free shipping with Amazon and also purchased two 160GB SATA drives for quick and easy installation. The web interface for the NAS 200 guided me through configuring these two dives as a RAID1 mirror with no trouble at all.

The NAS 200 also has a built in http service used for configuration of the device. Not documented well is that any web browser client may be used to also view the files stored on the device. This is a great feature! My son loves to look at all the digital pictures we have saved over the years and now can do so without the possibility of accidental deletion. The http service also worked great streaming video to VLC across our home's wifi network.

Just remember that any files you copy to the PUBLIC DISK share is read/write access for all defined users on the NAS 200. Your personal stuff should, of course, be saved in a share defined for your desired username. Just read the product manual for more info.

So... the NAS 200 was purchased with the intention of replaceing a very old Linux PC acting as our home's file storage server. The NAS 200 works great with our Linux and Windows PCs, file transfers seem snappy and are error free, video streams from the web interface without lost frames. Thanks Linksys!