So I was wandering around in the local Best Buy about a week ago and ran across this device. I picked it up and through that it would be cool to have a hard disk I could just plug into my network and be done with it as far as having a secondary backup location for my home LAN computers.
So I get it home and follow the instructions, plug it in and install the software. Turns out the adamant instructions that you run the software on every computer that will access the device are unneeded. So long as you can get to your network neighborhood, you can just locate the device that way.
Once I had found the device, I renamed it to something more memorable and started copying files to it. Backups - large 2 and 4 GB sized split archives to be accurate. Backups as suggested by the box. Even plugged into a gigabit switch with gigabit computer sources, could not get more than 700/kbps copying files, whereas copying to another computer plugged into the same hub would get between 10 and 30/MBps - almost as good as a USB hard disk conected directly to the computer. Files I had tried to copy to this NAS device were projecting 16-20 HOURS, whereas copying to another computer on the LAN - even wireless, was complete in a fraction of that time (as in less than an hour).
Hmmm, the speed was not working for me, so I did some Googling to find out if there was a firmware update I should have had. Turns out, I had the latest. I also found out that the problems most likely stem from the fact that the computer that lives inside the device has only 32MB RAM. There's your bottleneck - the computer inside didn't have enough memor to buffer the files being written to it.
On top of the speed issue, I was also having trouble with security on the device. I run an Active Directory domain on my home network and I joined it to the domain. From several computers, logged in using the same domain credentials, I accessed the device. On some computers I was able to read/write files written from another system, but on other sytems or in the case of some files, I was only able to read/write/delete a file if I accessed it from the computer that I used to put it there. On top of this, the web GUI for the device made mention of joining workgroups and domains and loosing ACLs - well I know what that means, but the average home user isn't - not good instructions.
So, seeing as I had had it for less than a week and got such unsatisfactory results, I took it back to Best Buy - which was also a good thing as it was put on sale for $30 less than I had paid for it. I was far better off putting an extra disk in one of my other computers to do some cross pollenating backups rather than attempting to use this NAS device.