Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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57 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Works, but slow, August 31, 2007
The others have said it as well as I can. I agree with almost everything written (except the brief 2 line review that says it stinks). But here is my pro/con/comment report:
Pros: Very easy to setup. Very easy to install SATA drives (no cables, just slide in like a hot-swappable scsi drive). NO CLIENT SOFTWARE needed to map drives (just connect to \\nas200\sharename). Web based configuration so no software needed to manage. Option to power down hard drives after 10/20 minutes of inactivity, then another option to power down internal fan 10/20 minutes AFTER hard drives power down (to allow case to cool, I guess. This option makes the unit completely silent when not in use (this wasn't mentioned in other reviews). Inserting a USB hard drive (even one previously formatted as NTFS) results in instant detection, AND instant default share created (\\nas200\disk_1_1 for USB1). (to remove the usb external drive while the NAS is running press the small eject button next to the appropriate USB port. If you pull the cable or shut down the external drive, the NAS needs to be reset to see ALL shares). RAID1 option for protecting that precious data (it recommends configuring as individual drives, but no way would I do that. Why wouldn't you select RAID1 if available? Protect those precious family pictures, guys!). Small footprint, stacks with other linksys gear (routers, switches, APs, etc). Option to automatically shutdown every day or a given day of week at a set time. As nice as that is, the fact that the drives and then fan shutdown after inactivity makes it quiet and power saving anyway. Smaller and quieter and easier than using a separate computer (if you were considering making a Linux file "server" out of that spare tower case you had lying around). You don't need client software to map drives, however, the included client software, if you choose to install it, is very helpful and makes mapping drives very easy (adds a system tray icon to quickly map/unmap drives). Also, the software lets you attach the external USB drives from the NAS as if they were local USB drives (which I thought was very cool).
Cons: somewhat slow. I did 6GB in 30 minutes, so figure over an hour for 10-12GB of data over the 100Mb network. I think people are expecting too much from FastEthernet. Especially if you are using wireless! Here are the numbers: 100Megabits per second = 12.5megabytes per second = 750megabytes/minute = 45,000megabytes/minute = 44(real)Gigabytes/minute (assume 40 because FastEthernet really only gets around 90Mb/s in real world). So this unit is running around 25Mb instead of 100. But I wouldn't throw it out because of that. Also, if you are on wireless, well then your network is only really going around 12Mb/s at its best (over 802.11g) real world numbers. To display the list of files in an explorer window sometimes takes 10-20 seconds (but sometimes the files pop right up in a few seconds). When you have gigabit file sharing at work, the NAS is excruciatingly slow. No support for usb printer (the SLUG unit that linksys sells, basically this device with only 2 external USB drive support, has an active community writing Linux firmware that adds all kinds of features, including print server and firewall. I wonder if anyone is working on open source firmware for the nas200?). I digress. More cons: no provision to backup internal drives to external drives (another item on my Linux wishlist). For some reason, I thought that was mentioned on the spec sheet. If you pull an external drive, all shares disappear and you have to power cycle the unit. Takes almost 2 minutes to boot up. No option to power down external USB drives after inactivity, so even when the nas200 fan and internal drives shutdown, the external drives are still humming along. Not as feature rich as making a Linux file server out of that spare computer case you have lying around ;-).
Conclusion: I like the unit. I think it's really 3.5 stars. Its a little slow, but quiet and small, and it holds as much as you put in (I got two 320GB SATA drives, $80 each). If the USB ports could be print servers, that would be one less device in my linksys "stack". If the box could automatically backup internal drives to the external USB, that would be a little more peace of mind. I use it as my picture, document, and MP3 primary storage. The raid1 protects my data, and I use external USB drives to backup (but it's combersome because I simply map drive letters to both the internal drives and the external drives, then copy from one to the other. It would be nice if that feature was built-in). Its nice to have a unified file storage system at home, where I have 4 laptops and a desktop (for gaming :-), and to do it for about $300. Considering the small outlay, its worth getting to fool around with. If in the end, the speed is too slow for your home/SOHO network...you are only out $140 (and you can put the SATA drives in your beefy gaming rig).
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46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just what our busy home network needed!, April 4, 2008
I read alot of pretty negative reviews of the NAS 200 but decided to buy it anyway. My experience with this product has been entirely positive. I owned the earlier 'SLUG' model from Linksys and the NAS 200 is a massive improvement.
Many of the reviews talk about how slow the NAS 200 is at uploading/downloading. Personally I just don't notice it as a problem. In fact it seems pretty fast to me. My primary interest was to install a RAID 1 backup server with good FTP server access so I could easily get to my files while on the road. I dropped two 500 GB SATA drives into the unit and configured RAID 1 giving me around 450GB of storage with the comfort that if either drive fails, I can replace it and not lose any data.
The FTP server function seems to work well. I configured all the computers in the house to be able to easily connect to the NAS 200 through Windows Explorer and I setup the free (1 year) Dynamic DNS service so I can navigate to the NAS 200 from anywhere I can get internet access.
Note that getting access to the NAS from the internet will require you to configure internal "Port Forwarding" on your NAT home router. I think the unit comes with instructions for setting this up on the Linksys WRT54G. In any case, you will need to forward port 20 traffic. Make sure you understand how to setup 'strong' passwords or every nut on the the internet will gain access to your NAS 200!
Overall, I am very happy with this product. As some may have mentioned the cooling fans are a bit loud so you may want to find an out of the way corner where you have cat 5 internet cable access to your NAT where it can sit and "hum".
The one thing I felt this unit should have offered was a Print Server function on one of the two USB ports. It doesn't.
Bonus info 1: note that the NAS 200 does not support NTFS on the internal SATA drives. You can however add USB drives that are already formatted in NTFS and it will work fine.
Bonus info 2; you cannot control who gets access to the data on the USB drives. In effect when you add a USB drive it becomes 'Public' for all registered users to read/write.
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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Easy setup, very stable, horrible large file transfer speeds, July 31, 2007
Linksys could not make it any easier to set up this device. The install utility work with Windows Vista, sets up the drives, and automatically maps a network drive. Unfortunately, the transfer speeds are absolutely terrible. Moving 5 files for a total of 5.30GB, from the pc to the NAS200 took just under 40 minutes with an average transfer speed of less than 3.60MB/sec. Since it has a 10/100 interface I knew the theoretical maximum transfer speed was 12.5MB/sec and I was hoping to get somewhere around 8-10MB/sec on writes and reads. But, to get less than 3.60MB/sec is pathetic. Once the files are transferred, the access time before the files will be display is even worse. My 5 files took almost 12 seconds for before they were ready to be accessed.
However, the bright side is if you set up the device using RAID1 and move all your files to the NAS200 in the event something goes wrong and you lose a drive, just take out the busted one and replace it with a new one. I have no idea what the rebuild process is like, but as long as it works I will be satisfied. Also, for the price Amazon is charging it balances out the pro and cons.
I have not tested out the FTP and media server functions. I also have Linksys' WRT350N Wireless-N router that has a USB storage link and media server. It works perfectly for FTP across the internet and media serving to a DLink DSM-510 in my home, so I also expect the NAS200 to work perfectly.
Overall, I have to give it four stars. I would like to give it 3, but I feel the price point is right on the money. Anything more than what is being charge is a pure rip-off. If I were sending and receiving large files on a regular basis, I'd go with something else. Something with a strong CPU and gigabit ethernet connections. Other than for forementioned shortcomings, this is satifactory for collecting small files that accumulation over time.
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