Hitachi SimpleNET NAS Head USB 2.0 Portable Dongle SNET (Black)

by Hitachi

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 2.5 x 5 x 7 inches ; 9.6 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B002CMEIV6
• Item model number: SNET
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 8, 2009

Product Description

SimpleNET is the easiest way to make your existing USB drive even more valuable! Share its contents across your network, quickly and easily! SimpleNET is a small network adapter that enables you to share and access existing USB hard drives over a network. Simply plug a USB hard drive into SimpleNET and then plug SimpleNet into an Ethernet network. The drive then appears as a network drive on the network. Easy to install, easy to use! SimpleNet is extremely cost effective too! Why pay more for a new hard disk drive? Make your investments pay off by sharing music, photos, videos or documents in minutes! No configuration necessary, no additional drives to buy.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars SimpleNet USB NAS - Not Quite out of Beta, July 8, 2009

By 

Gadget Girl "LeighAnn" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hitachi SimpleNET NAS Head USB 2.0 Portable Dongle SNET (Black) (Personal Computers)

Hatachi SimpleNet NAS USB to Ethernet promises a truly simple way to connect a USB storage device to your home network via wired Ethernet connected to your home router. Setup and control is managed through an internal web server accessible through Apple's Bonjour (zero configuration networking) software. No MAC (Media Access Control) address in included on the box so installation of Bonjour for windows ([...]) is mandatory. Apple Mac users have Bonjour built-in to OS X through Safari.

All of this innovation as well as the small form factor induced me to purchase the device and set it up for use with both USB thumb drives as well as a Western Digital external USB storage device.

As promised SimpleNet connected to the disk / flash subsystems and made the storage accessible over my home network via Bonjour. However in about 10 minutes the plastic box housing SimpleNet became very warm. At that time the disk / flash subsystems were no longer network accessible. The internal web broswer's setup pages then became blank and no longer displayed information.

Removing the power (supplied through an included 5 volt adapter) for twenty minutes to permit the device to cool again allowed me to connect to my storage, but only after repeating the setup process. Clearly this became tedious.

Note that no paper manual is provided and the mini disk containing the manual and Bonjour for Windows software is only compatible with tray drives CD readers.

Sadly it's back to the store with this device. It would have been a great way to create a NAS (Network Attached Storage) system to a home or small business network. I hope they try again, but first do the beta testing in the lab.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It works, but with some limitations, September 27, 2009

By 

Core (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hitachi SimpleNET NAS Head USB 2.0 Portable Dongle SNET (Black) (Personal Computers)

First the good...
+ It does work and was super simple to get set up in my windows environment. The instructions are good enough and if you know how to determine the IP address from your router (e.g. look at list of 'attached devices') then you will be accessing the drive right away.
+ The web interface is nice and fast compared to some NAS that I've used in the past.
+ For tinkerers, you can SSH into the box so you could install your own software for its ARM processor. I found that there are remnants of a BT client on the device but it doesn't run because it is missing the c++ library.
+ It is amazingly small! If you are OK with some of the negatives then this is the best part.

But there is the bad (and I'm repeating what other folks mentioned)...
- Transfer speed is pretty slow. But that is a trade-off you make for the price and size, so I don't really hold this against the SimpleNET. For example on a 500 MB file I saw 650 KB/sec writes and 2 MB/sec reads. This was to a Western Digital drive formatted to NTFS.
- The file limit in the current firmware cannot go above something like 2 GB (I tried 3+ GB files and Vista would tell me that the file already existed, but it wasn't really there). Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any explanation of the file size limits from the support web site. That's too bad because if they could fix this problem and most people would be happy with the SimpleNET.

So overall because it is so tiny you might be happy with the SimpleNET if you are sharing documents smaller than 2 GB and don't need really fast speeds. So, photos, music, and probably streaming some video is fine. You aren't going to be using this for your network backups. I'd recommend copying large files to your drives directly then attaching the drive to the SimpleNET.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars SimpleNet = SimplyAwful, September 2, 2009

By 

Thomas D. Dison "Simpleton Class" (Southern Illinois) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hitachi SimpleNET NAS Head USB 2.0 Portable Dongle SNET (Black) (Personal Computers)

This device is one of the few purchases I have made where I can say I really blew it. For all practical purposes this is a discontinued device that is hanging on by a thread. I purchased it as Office Max, and it was relatively easy to setup. The problem is this:

1. It is GODAWFUL slow. Transfers over a direct network connection gives transfer rates of 500-600 K/s. You might as well be copying over the internet.

2. Files appear to be limitted to 2GB in size. When I copied a larger file, it was invisible over the network. I did read that if you accessed the drive via FTP (it has a built-in FTP and SSH server), then the file would be visible.

3. Support for the device is non-existent. Going to the Hitachi product page offers little help. It show the device, but there is no information available under downloads, support, user manuals, etc. It appears to me that they are tryiing to let this device slowly disappear. I wonder if it has anything to do with the use of Linux and FAT (like Tom-Tom).

Stay away, unless you only want to backup small files (like documents of 1-10MB). Otherwise, it will drive you crazy.