Customer Reviews

NETGEAR SC101 Storage Central

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(25)
1 star:		(107)

 

 

Well I purchased 4 of these units, hoping to make this stack of 40GB, 80GB and 120GB drives I have laying around the house useful again. So far, buying these was not a good idea. I attribute most of my problems to there not being enough real technical review of the product available, and all documentation simply glosses over technical details in exchange for sales-speak. First, I'll say these are niftily crafted units that might have been pretty slick if they'd worked the way I expected them to. Problems encountered and gripes mounted include:

* These are not NAS devices, as some of the documentation might lead you to believe. A NAS device (network attached storage) typically offers clients the ability to connect to the device, using it's native fileshare method. CIFS for Windows, NFS for Linux/Unix, etc. These devices offer none of that.

* Device is available to Windows clients on the network only. If that's not bad enough, check the following gripe.

* Every PC that wants to access the device needs to have the software CD installed. Usually a NAS device will offer a shared filesystem that can be mounted in the OS's native method. With this box, all the PCs need to have a driver installed in order to see the device.

* DHCP only. There is no option to have a static IP address on the device. It is DHCP only.

* On first install, lamely worded error message hindered the install. After installing the device and the driver, it kept failing with the error "Unable to enumerate drive". The help file was useless. After an hour of messing with it and finally deleting all of my mapped drives, the installation suceeded and I was able to use the device.

* You MUST use the included software. Although the device seems to be listening on port 80, there is no web interface to configure it. The included software, running on Windows is the only way.

* Non-Windows systems are out of luck. This is a Windows only device. Do not try to connect to it with Mac OSX or Linux (both of which I have). The device can be connected and re-shared by a Windows PC, allowing Macs and Linux to get to it, but this has proved painstakingly slow.

* Painstakingly slow. I connected the device to an older Windows PC and the best sustained data transfer I could get (read or write) was around 3MB/s. Hardly a speed demon. My linux fileserver on the same network can easily sustain 10MB/s. I am going to connect the device to a faster Xeon based system and see how speedy it is then.

* Simple security. I saw no method of creating usernames or any kind of security on the device other than the single password that can be setup to access the device. Probably because this is designed for the home where there are not a bunch of users and passwords to manage.

Now this is a pretty new product, so hopefully it will get better with time. It seemed like such a good idea (obviously, I bought 4 of them), but I'm not convinced it was the best execution. Buyer beware.

I decided to return this device after using it for fourteen days.

Some of the reviews talk about replacing file servers with this device, which is probably too much to ask. The SC101 actually offers a great feature set for its price and, for the home user, it certainly looks good on paper.

Installation was easy, upgrading the firmware was easy, and the backup software that comes with it is among the best I have seem in terms of being user friendly and having a nice feature set.

If you are a home user, the fact that static IP addresses are not supported is almost irrelevant. The beginners probably have DHCP on their network already, so this should not even be an issue. If you do not, any cheap router will let you create static DHCP leases that will keep security while supporting this device. All you have to do is create a range with four IP addresses per SC101 on your home network. This can be much more difficult to pull off on an office/corporate network--again, this is a device for the home and small business user.

There is plenty of documentation in Netgear's site. Believe me: I bought and returned a couple of enclosures before I got this one. They were more expensive, worked erratically, and had NO documentation WHATSOEVER. Manufacturers think these devices are simple enough so they cut corners in documentation. Well, turns out they are not. I bought a quad drive icebox 800 enclosure and it was the worst piece of equipment I have seen in ten years of experience in IT.

The device is very silent and powers itself off when sees no activity.

Some of the cons include a relatively big AC adapter, and the fact that the file system is proprietary (not readable without the Netgear software). This should not matter for most home users. Make sure the drives you attach to the enclosure are clean and all the data in them has been backed up BEFORE you install them in the SC101.

My overall rating is low because I could not get any write speeds better than 600Kb--much less than the almost 7Mb advertised. Netgear support blamed it on spyware. On a freshly installed machine? At this speed, it takes up to two days to copy 100GB of data. Some people claim they have seen better performance, but I tried troubleshooting this device for two weeks with little improvement.

This device is not supported under Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Hmmmm. Where to start?

NETGEAR - Big company with reliable COMMODITY datacomm equipment. Great idea: network drive enclosure for multiple disks at reasonable price So I bought the SC101 for use as backup network drive. ...... what's not to like?
1) almost non-existent documentation in the box
2) wizard that didn't display completely within the window boundaries (and adjust sizes (excuse me, i guess that was a learning experience) only some user configuration time lost readjusting font sizes)
3) initial backup was 20 hours and still ticking when i pulled the plug ..... upon investigation (at the NETGEAR site) it was duly noted that "alas" the SC101 does not perform well on wireless networks. This was especially ironic since the packaging illustrates my EXACT laptop to wireless router to network over ethernet cable configuration....... After wiring my laptop DIRECTLY to the wireless router, the backup took only 3 hours.
4) But then I lost connectivity - repowering the SC101 brought connectivity back. Upon investigation (at the NETGEAR users group) i noted that the unit has a tendency to go to sleep.
(never did get an idea about the timeout period - but would be willing to investigate and document as an SQA consultant at a reasonable rate (:-)) The NETGEAR users group did suggest a number of work arounds of which i didn't feel i had adequate skill set - but I did find that using my backup software to provide a periodic backup in advance of the timeout kept the unit alive.
5) contacted "official" NETGEAR support (by email) waited a day for responses like:
"We apologize for the inconvenience it might have caused. Regards." ........
6) After noting from user's group that others had similar problems for a few months, I asked support when the issues might
be addressed. "Look to our website....." was the response.

BOTTOM LINE: Product does not operate as advertised, Support is non-existent. You're on your own.....

I have had the SC101 for 9 months now. Initially I set it up with 2 x 250GB drives, one for mirroring. It worked OK for a while, then I could not see the partitions and went to the Netgear web-site for help, went through all the doco and eventually posted a support log. Got the routine reply (probably from India) pointing me to various support doco I had already read and tried. I also got involved in running the UT DOS utility to try and sort things out. In the end, I reinstalled everything, re-formatted the drives and chose not to mirror but to use the bundled SmartsynchPro to backup the two drives. OK for a while BUT eventually back to square 1 - No visibility of the SC101 drives. 3 flashing lights on the unit and only Netgears' less than useful comment on the web-site "Problem with the DHCP Server" and no useful tips on how to approach a solution. I am no PC dummy but neither am I a network techie and this device and the support is 100% unfriendly. I have picked up on another forum that the DHCP lease time on the router needs to be increased. I have re-booted PCs, Router, and SC101 many, many times when I could have been earning some dosh. Today I tweaked the DHCP lease time to half a million seconds and the unit has come to life again - WOW - Will it last!!!! I have no idea and don't even have time to understand what DHCP lease time is! Another issue is the bundled SmartsynchPro. The facilities are great BUT Bill Gates won't let me assign fixed drive letters to the SC101 partitions, unlike the drives in the PC. So, the backup fails when the drive letters don't match the backup path. I have posted queries to Netgear and Smartsynch who admire the issue but have no solution - so what's the point of using this software to backup data on this device? Also, the hard drives are not FAT or NTFS so are useless outside of the SC101 unless re-formatted. I thought it would be great to be able to backup data to an independent device but have no confidence in doing this and have spent hours and hours and hours...... trying to get a resilient solution so writing this review only adds a little more time to the total. There are numerous negative reviews of this device elsehere on various forums - please heed them - I never appreciated that I was an early adopter of this technology but it's painful!!!

I understand technology, and have had to tinker with plenty of products in the past, before they would work correctly. But this is, without a doubt, the worst computer product I have ever purchased. I've been a loyal Netgear customer for many years, and the SC101 was such a waste of time and money that I will never again take a risk on Netgear. I no longer trust them to deliver on the promises they make on their glossy boxes.

* To make the SC101 work, I had to buy two BRAND NEW hard drives, because it wouldn't work with the 6 month old drives I already had. Ok, whatever.

* Documentation was typically Netgear. I've given them a pass in the past for their crappy manuals -- but come on, guys!

* The required, windows-only software is miserable. Bad UI, it crashed during a flash memory upgrade, and slow.

* It would never stay connected to my (ALL NETGEAR) network for more than a couple of hours. It would just randomly disappear. Well, that's odd..

* Performance was horrible. Over a 54Mbps wireless network, it topped out at about 10Mpbs. In the meantime, the computer was brought to its knees by the bloated driver software.

* And God forbid I tried to actually copy files from my PC onto it. Poof! The NAS crashes, the PC crashes, and I still don't know what data got copied or not.

* Tech support (in India) was miserable. In the end, the only recommendation was that I buy more stuff from Netgear (because if it can't reach full capacity over a 54Mpbs network, then of course it will work perfectly over a 108Mpbs network)

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I have nothing good to say about the SC101. I wish Amazon would let me give it negative stars. I don't know what to recommend instead, but if you're looking for something to do what the SC101 claims to do, keep looking. This one is a complete dog.

If you buy this, you'll need this phone number 1.866.274.4428. This is product support here in the US. Otherwise if you write them on their site or call in blindly to their general support line, you'll get someone in India. They don't have a clue either.

I've been in the business for 12+ years. Trust me. Stay away until they get the kinks worked out. It could be a good product but clearly the business folks got in the way and had this product released before it was thoroughly tested.

The software used to connect to the device can cause your Windows box to lag badly during initial login, prevent you from shutting down cleanly, or may not even to connect to the device at all. I had major issue after installing this software (and this was on multiple pc's)

The hardware itself has an auto drive shutdown feature. After 8 minutes of inactivity, they go to sleep. Well, they don't always wake back up either when you try to connect. The only solution is to unplug and replug it back in.....this is one of a number of known issues being looked at by development.

I bought it, tried to work with support (could not resolve due to issues needing to be addressed by development -> no ETA on fixes either). So, I returned the product to save my dime on this one.

Pros: Nice looking, cheap, compact..
Cons: CHEAP! real slow. has a lot of driver problems. slows down some systems after installing its drivers. not reliable.. waste of time and money.

What should I say ? I'm fully dissapointed with this product. It was a big mistake to buy it.
Where should I start from ?
- It's metal body is so tight that Western Digital disks won't fit in ! You have to hit them with a hammer !
- Heat sinking is terrible with no ventilation !
- Poor performance - SSSSLLLOOOOWWWWW data transfer rates...
- Security is so silly - no users - only 1 password...
- Reliability is very poor - sometimes it works - sometimes doesn't
- Cannot define an IP address - must have DHCP service running on your network...
- Storage management software = proprietary netgear...
I suggest you stay away from this product (I was not wise enough to read the amazon customer reviews...)

I purchased this product, thinking it would connect directly to my network, and provide a drive I could mount in windows or linux (via SMB). I thought it would provide an icon in the "My Network Places" icon in windows XP, after receiving an IP address from my DHCP server. I foolishly thought I would be able to configure the machine via a web interface. Man, I was totally wrong.

First off it only supports windows. You need to install "drivers" and they are supposed to look out on the network and "mount" the drive for you. The instructions for installing the "drivers" were completely wrong. At one point I was asked if I wanted to look for updates on the web. I did, it found them, then installed them for me. When I launched the program (it installed three, and It's not clear what each of them do), it asked if I wanted to look for updates on the web (again!), so I said yes. It found more updates (why couldn't it get them the first time), and while installing them, the program crashed with a seg. fault.

BOOO NETGEAR!

I tried one of the other programs to see what it does. It launched and asked for my serial number. I entered it and was told it was invalid! I re-tried the code, as it was the only number I could find in the whole packaged labeled "SN".

After that I immediately uninstalled everything, re-packaged it, and took it back to Best Buy for a full refund. This product is not worth a minute of my time!

It's a shame, because Netgear could have been on to something really great here. All I want is a consumer product that plugs into the network and gives the network a shared drive resource, that is configurable via a simple web interface. I do not want to install "drivers" on every machine to access the drives.

I suspect if a manufacturer can produce such a product, it would be an instant hit (assuming it works well).

This is good product for its intended home use. There are some things that it will not do. For example:
- It does not have NFS or CIFS support meaning that you have to use the included software to access the storage from Windows only. Although you can then share the drive to other systems.
- You cannot remove the hard drive(s) and put them into a PC since it uses a proprietary filesystem.
- The mirroring is done through software by the PC using the device. This makes writing to mirrored drives go at about 3MB/sec depending on the network and PC.

That being said, if you want a very simple Windows only device that can store data on the network and you do not need blazing speed this device is great. It is fast enough to stream music and video and makes a great place to backup important files.

One nice feature is that it uses passive cooling with no noisy fans. Make sure to update to the latest software and firmware as this allows the drives to spin down when not in use. If the drives are kept spinning it will get quite hot.

The Netgear forum for this product is a wealth of knowledge.
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So far the SC101 has performed great for me and I'm happy with it. It looks like Netgear has been regularly posting new firmware so the interface and speed should get better with time.