Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I picked this up from Fry's for $30 (on sale). I read a lot of the reviews and agree it is not a speed demon. I clocked the writes at 5 Mbps and reads at 13 Mbps. During the writes the the SimpleNet CPU was pegged at 100% (CPU bound) and during the reads the SimpleNet CPU was at 50% (not CPU bound).

For the price this is a great device. I use it to store my pictures, mp3 audio, etc... My files are not large (less then 2GB) so I can't comment on some of the errors other reviewers have seen. So far I don't have any problems the reading the data. The transfer rate of 13 Mbps is sufficient for me. I have been working with computers for over 30 years so the slowness of the system does not bother me (I remember the days of 300 Baud modems). Copying folders with many files can be problematic.

The device was very simple to set up. I found the IP address of the device on my router. I used my browser to attach to it. The menus are very easy to understand.

If you have Unix experience I would recommend that you download PUTTY and SSH to the SimpleNet device. The one error I have found in the manual so far is that if you are going to change the password to the sshadmin account qualify the account (passwd sshadmin).

For the price I am completely satisfied. I was planning to build my own Linux server but I saw this device on sale and gave it a shot. It is so small and inexpensive I had to try it and I am glad I did.

I have tried the Xmeta and Netgear (SC101) NAS devices. They are definitely faster, but they are bigger and require extra drivers to manage and utilize them. The SimpleNet device does not. If you are a Unix user I think you will get a kick out of logging into the box playing with it.

UPDATE:

Streaming 320x240 avi video works. 640x480 and 1280 x 720 avi's do not.

I attached a FAT32 drive to the SimpleNet and the write rates tripled to 15Mbps and the reads were a little of 16Mbps.The behavior of this product is erratic in terms of stability if you use it as a samba server with FAT32.

I installed winSCP and used the FTP option. The behavior of the SimpleNet is very stable as an FTP server. The read and write rates are around 15 Mbps.


Summary:

As an FTP server it is a stable with ok transfer speeds. As a samba server with NTFS it is slow and problematic (copying folders with many files), with FAT32 it is slow (faster than NTFS), erratic and problematic.

After playing with it for several days I have lowered the rating to 3 stars.

If you looking for a windows file server it does work slowly. If you looking for an FTP server works fine and is stable.

Surprisingly, this is a good Nas device for its price. I did not know what to expect for the Simplenet dongle. I like the design because it is plain and simple. The main reason why I bought this dongle is to share my attached devices to anyone on my network. As a Mac user, I was pleasantly surprise that this dongle is cross-platform. All my Macs and PC's are able to use this device. The itunes server is simply amazing. I can share all my music from an external hard drive to all my computers. All the features have been working. There are something's that can be improved. The transfer rate could be improved. The device itself gets pretty hot. I wish this thing had gigabit Ethernet, but even though it has some flaws I still say it's a good device for its price.

Setup was simple, and was easy to find. Works with XP and Vista. Speed seems about on par. HOWEVER, it will not write files bigger than 2GB in size. XP will give you a copy error when the file size hits 2GB, and Vista simply will not even attempt to write the file. Files larger than 2GB can be accessed just fine (but haven't tested files as large as the other reviewer). The drive I have hooked to it is formatted NTFS. Doesn't have any physical documentation, but the user guide on the CD is just as extensive as it needs to be... with the exception of stating the 2GB file size limit... but hopefully it is something that can be fixed with a firmware update.

UPDATE (5/2/10): OK, so I finally got around to checking for new firmware on this little puppy, and was delighted to see that there finally was an update, so I promptly installed it. The first thing I tried was to copy a 2.5GB file to it from my Windows Vista machine, and it copied successfully! Yeah! Anyway, it's still slooooowwww.... but still quite capable as a backup device if speed is not of concern. Due to the new firmware, I've bumped up my rating by a star.

I wish I had seen the other reviews listed here before I purchased this item. Despite its name, it is far from simple. First: it was not very easy to set up and the help file isn't very helpful. It seems to be more inclined to MACs than PC. Second: it would not recognize my external drive until I had reformatted it. Fortunately, it was a new drive and had no data. Third: the unit ran EXTREMELY warm. If you like hot rock massages, you could use this adaptor as a excellent substitute. Fourth: the data transfer rate was very slow, I am talking snail pace on even small (under 10MB) files. At one point the remaining time to completion was showing as 203 minutes on a 15MB file. Fifth: When I finally managed to get a video transferred over, the playback was choppy and would run for only a few seconds before causing my media player to lock up.

Overall, it is a piece of junk. Fortunately, I purchased it only a week ago and saved the receipt so it will be going back to the retailer tomorrow.

Just bought a SimpleNet at Frys, $40, pretty good price. Also got an iHome 7-port USB hub for $30. The SimpleNet came up with no problem plugged into my GiGE D-Link switch, it successfully discovered an Iomega 320G external HD, 2 thumb drives and one Wolverine 80G mini-hard drive, all of which were plugged into the USB hub. The Iomega had it's own power and the Wolverine was using USB power. I was able to map all the devices as network drives (in XP) and was able to see them from multiple computers on my network. I was able to read/write to all drives, the Iomega was NTFS, all the others were FAT. This was very nice because the hard drives required no re-formatting and with the hub I was not limited to the two USB ports on the SimpleNet. The other USB to NAS device, the Addonics, specifically says that they do not support a USB hub, and there is also some question on whether you need to reformat your drives. I installed the latest firmware and was able to copy over files in excess of 2G (i.e. 7G video ISO file). I was also able to stream the 7G video ISO file from my USB, over the SimipleNet, to a networked media player (Asus) to my TV, watched the video for several hours, I did not notice any stutters or any video lockups. I don't know how it would be for a high def blue ray file.

That is all good, now for the bad. The copies are PAINFULLY slow. The 7G ISO took 3+ hours to copy from my Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ (with GiGE) to my Iomega NTFS formated Iomega. The copies to my FAT32 Wolverine were a little faster. A folder with ~18G of video VOB files took a little over 2 hours. This is very bad, I think the best bet is to get all the big the content copied to your USB drives directly from a computer then add all the USB drives to your network via the SimpleNet. The device did run a little warm as people have said, but it did not seem excessive to me. I think if they can get the speed to a reasonable level (maybe make it GiGE), this would be a kick-butt device, remember, it was only $40.

I grabbed one of these to serve as a temporary NAS after the USB ports on a server started to flake out. Bad move. My first hint was that it just couldn't handle windows credentials, so I had to enter a password to connect to a password protected share. Fine for home use, bad for an unattended backup. There's no other security setting on this, so I modified the /etc/smb/smb.conf file to only allow my server to hit it with no authentication. That worked, until I reboot it. It had actually left the change in the file, but connected out one of the two lines I added.

Some more issues:

* It's slow. The 100Mbps connection is bad enough, but it won't get anywhere near that speed.
* It's unreliable. I have to reboot the thing daily to get it to work.
* It does not support Windows Domain Authentication. Despite being based on the Samba server, it just doesn't support the really good features for getting this to interop with anything more than the home versions of Windows.
* It supports configuration from SSH, and then overwrites your some of your changes on boot up. Awesome.

The good news is that it is just a little Linux box so it's hackable. It's easy enough to setup and run and for home use, it might be usable, just make sure you're using a FAT32 disk attached to it and not storing files bigger than 2GB.

Would I use it as a NAS? No. It's just too unreliable for the job.

First of all, for those who complained about the speed, read the manual. While NTFS is supported by the device, it is not recommended due to the slow speed. Format your drives to FAT32 and the read/write speed bumps from 500kb/s to 4mb/s average. Reading speed should be faster. Also, turn off features you don't use such as FTP, iTune server, ssh, etc. This device has 64mb memory and is worth the money.

If you are good w/ computers, you can hack it and use openWRT. I'm planning to setup a printer server w/ this device as well.