Customer Reviews

NETGEAR SC101TNA Storage Central Turbo

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

 

 

I bought this because I needed some shared storage and had some extra SATA drives. It took only a minute to pop the drives in (no screws) and hook it up. The problems started when I installed the drivers and software.

Note that every PC on the network that wants to access the SC101T must have the drivers installed. Unfortunately, the drivers and software seem to be poorly written, with many problems occuring with no feedback and poor tools to help figure out what was going on. One drive letter kept disappearing, copying a large set of files completely locked up my system, and other real time programs like video players and Windows Media Player became slow and jerky, sometimes seeming to lock up.

When it works, the file transfer speeds are quite slow. I have a 100Mbps Netgear router, not a gigabit router, but given the problems with the software and drivers I would guess that they could be a bottleneck even with higher network rates. But beware, when it is working it can really tie up the available bandwidth of your Ethernet network.

I found that when I turned off my firewall and antihacker protection that the drive letters stayed around, the file copies worked without hanging. I started fiddling with the individual detail settings on the firewall, but kept finding more problems and finally gave up because it was too much work. Again, if the Netgear software tools were better they would give you some feedback about why it wasn't connecting or whatever and lead you to the correct settings on your firewall much much faster than just guessing and trying different combinations of settings.

Even with the firewall turned off, and the disk operating correctly, I found that other programs like video players (a couple seconds delay between video and audio - very bad viewing experience) were still affected even when there was no disk activity. This was unacceptable.

I also realized that all of the valuable data that I planned to store on this drive would now be on disks with a proprietary format! That means I can't pop them out and put them in a PC or other drive enclosure and access any of the data! It has to be this or a related device.

So I finally decided to remove the software and drivers (everything is now running normally again) and order some SATA to USB 2.0 external drive enclosures instead and put my drives in those. I'll have to move the USB drives around or use Windows file sharing to share files between machines, but that is worth the higher speeds, standard disk formats and no extra drivers or software to mess up my system.

The Storage Central Gigabit unit is very nice looking and super easy to install drives (the front plate just slides off, slide the SATA drive in, put the front plate back on). However, as others have noted, it's not really a NAS device since every computer has to have the CD drivers installed in order to use it. It doesn't show up in your network folder and is totally invisible to your network computers, depending solely on it's on software. Besides that negative, it is not that fast. I have a gigabit adapter on my computer, a gigabit switch, and a gigabit router and it took 2 days (really, 2 days) to transfer around 300mb to it. I wanted it to put songs and movies on it and let everyone in my home with a computer use it when they wanted. It's just not up to it. My computer with it's gigabit NIC works great for that purpose, the SC101T doesn't. Again, it's just too slow and apparently does not achieve gigabit speeds from my point of view. I wish I had never purchased it.

This divice have to rely on installing it's own software to "see" it over the network, and the software does not support Windows Vista. If you need a NAS system for you LAN, this will not work.

This device does not work with 64 bit Vista, despite what Netgear advertises. Netgear is rather silent about this and does not even claim to have any 64 bit drivers in the works.

I'm returning it.

Strange to hear about other folks troubles with this product. I didn't experience anything bad at all and am quite happy with the gigabit performance. I am using mine to store media files including movies. They playback from the network drive and it plays back very smooth. The fact that the software makes the drive appear as a local drive was helpful too, otherwise I would get copyright violation errors from some download sites. My only surprise was that it didn't allow for RAID 0.

I was looking for a way to share files between 3 computers without having to rely on one of the computers being turned on or hung. This worked very well. I tested copying files from a workstation to a "real" 2003 server with 1 hard drive and the 466mb files took 1min 26sec. I copied the same files to the netgear with 2 500gb mirrored (raid 1) and it took 1 min 42 sec. Not scientific but gave me an example of what to expect. not much of a performance hit.

The sc101t boots and puts a DHCP assigned address to the hard drives. You must have dhcp running and you cannot assign a static address. I didn't like this.

It does make the drive look like a local drive to each computer after installing the software to each computer. This is nice because some off site backup routines only will backup local drives. It is also nice because the end user cannot "disconnect" the drive easily.

I originally bought two SC101's and they were slow, hot and awful.
I took a chance and then bought the SC101T unit and could not be
happier. We upgraded our network to gigabit and were surprised at
how fast the unit is. It runs cool and quiet and so far, after
6 months use, has been entirely dependable. It is great having it on the
network to be easily accessed by all our computers. I do keep external
firewire and esata drives also for extra backup. I never trust a single
source of backup. I highly recommend this unit!

I'm giving the SC101T a 3 out of 5 since the hardware itself is quite nice, but the software provided by Netgear is very poor. Setting up the drive and using it with various SATA drives is a snap. The trouble starts when using Netgear's required software. The developers apparently do not consult with end users when making the interface since even in Wizard-mode it is not intuitive, making the process of getting a drive formatted and mounted a real trick if your desired setup is anything other than plain vanilla. The help file doesn't go into much depth other than walking you through what the Wizard was already showing onscreen. If Netgear had better software, I'd give this a 5 out of 5 easily. But forcing the use of the included software in order to access the drive is a definite strike against the SC101T. Once I had things up and running though, my experience has been positive.

Do not buy this or you are very likely going to regret it. Even if it is on sale. I got this for less than $50 thinking it was a deal, and since I only wanted it as a backup for photos and video, speed was not of the highest priority.

But even with such lowered expectations this storage unit completely fails. I set it up in mirror mode with two 1.5T samsung harddrives and started putting my files on it.

1) In less than 3 days the mirroring failed. Thats right, and there is no easy recovery option, the user interface is terrible. To setup the mirror again, you have to wipe both drives and restart the whole process, you can not mirror in the middle and just make another copy.

2) It uses a proprietary file system so if your unit fails you can't just plug it into another external enclosure and read the data. You can't just setup ur drives as internal drives.

3) After reading some support forums, it turns out the mirroring is pretty much fubar and everyone recommends against using it. So I decide to scrap the mirroring and do the backups myself using the provided smartsync software. And the serial number activation does not work, so the bundled software is not useable. Calling netgear support gets clueless people who wants you to rebuild your enclosure when all I need is an activation code for bundled software.

in conclusion, avoid like the plague, and especially avoid any temptations due to lowered prices. It is highly debatable whether this thing is worth it if it was completely free.

I have used the SC101's for about 2 years with many of my clients and they are very nice, this SC101T just takes it to the next level. It is much faster than the prior model and setup takes less than 10 minutes.
I would highly recommend this, it is much safer for critical data than any external USB drive.