Customer Reviews

NAS with Built-in Blu-ray R/W

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I've put off reviewing this unit for many months. The reason is that it seems to have quality control issues. But LG *might* have resolved them at this point. Here's the run down.

I bought the first unit in November 2009. It was on sale for $300. I already had a number of 1TB drives on hand, so an empty NAS was perfect for me. I got it, installed one drive, updated the firmware for the unit, and... That was the first worrisome problem. The firmware was out of date. So I went to the LG site. I'll abbreviate and tell you that LG has many sites. Some don't even acknowledge the existence of this unit (but they know all about the 2 bay versions). After much searching and reading of forums, I found what I believe to be the most current Firmware. I had found 2 earlier versions on LG sites, but the latest was posted on LG's GERMAN site. I downloaded it and updated the unit. No problem. Easily done.

Then I proceeded to copy all of my files over to it. NOTE: This unit supports several different storage formats. I chose RAID 5 which allows one of the 4 drives to die without losing any of your data. But because this was my first encounter with RAID and I had the data on non-RAID drives, I had to clear off one drive, then add it to the unit and upload all of the cleared off data to it. Finally, I was ready to slide in the last of the four 1TB drives. I did, the unit alerted me to the addition, and I told it to add the drive to the RAID array. It took 1 week. It started out fine and on track for the expected 14 hours or so, but after 2 days, I called LG. They said that was NOT right and advised me to return the unit for replacement, but to let it finish. I did both.

The second unit, again, needed the firmware upgrade. This time, I had managed to get the 4 drives to all be Seagate 1TB drives. Not identical part numbers but 2 and 2 were. This unit took the expected amount of time to re-sync the volume, but it had a different quirk. It would sometimes forget about the drive in bay 4. I could log into the unit and it would tell me the volume was degraded, something it should have emailed me (It sends me daily status reports.) It should also have shown me a red light on the unit next to that drive, but it didn't. If I pulled the drive out, it would alert me and the red light would come on. Again, LG advised me to return it. So I did.

The third time has been the charm. It came with the update firmware, so maybe this is from a new batch. Only a guess. I slipped the 4 drives in, turned it on, and within 60 seconds, it was ready. That was a month ago and it's been wonderful ever since.

Other things of note:
The unit is VERY quiet. You could have it under your desk or on your desk and not be bothered by it. The web interface is very nice. You can get to the unit from anywhere in the world. It functions as an iTunes server and iTunes sees it automatically. You can plug one printer into it and the NAS acts a network printer server. It's got a built-in card reader and a re-writable Blu-Ray player. It has support for Macs with Time Capsule and the Mac filing system, but I use it with Windows 7. It even has built-in FTP support so you can use it as a file repository for your family photos and home movies.

As of the last month, I LOVE this unit. It works smoothly, stores all of my files, and backs them up automatically. But know that I didn't get to this point on my first try. I only hope LG has resolved the problems I originally encountered and continues to refine the product. It is a unique offering.

This is a pretty good unit. I have used it for a couple of months now. Its great with windows, not so much so with my linux boxes, which are the main reason I purchased this. It does not use sshfs or nfs for share mounting which is a shame, I am working on using afp for linux. Cifs not a strong or portable protocol, it requires too many commands in order to make work. Have not tried active directory. In short if you use windows or mac it is great, if you use linux, its not your best choice. I will post an addendum if I can get it to mount to my linux boxes using afp.

As this product is advertised as capable of joining AD domains, I bought 2 to archive files from our fileserver. After 2 hours of trying to get the NAS to join the domain I gave up and sought technical help from LG. After being bounced from one department to another I was told by their support rep that he couldnt help me with the problem as they use a Linux network! Brilliant, thanks for that LG.
If your considering using this product for anything more than a large networked USB hard drive, forget it.

If you plan to use this NAS with Active Directory integration, beware. Too many problems, even with latest firmware and after following all directions. The NAS says it connects properly with AD, but then you cannot access any network shares, getting the error "Configuration could not be read from the domain controller,..."

The web contact form for LG doesn't work, and the chat support refused to help with support. All in all, a big waste of time and money so far. There are better NAS solutions out there.