Netgear Storage Central
on 09.16.05, 06:23am in computers • comments (7)
I stumbled upon this yesterday and thought it was pretty neat: The Netgear SC-101 Storage Central.
Basically, it’s a small network hard drive enclosure that can house 2 3.5" IDE drives (parallel, not serial-ata). Some of the neat bits is that it includes ‘SmartSync" backup software, features Z-SAN and can do RAID-1 mirroring between the drives (it looks like that’s optional - you can shut off RAID).
Best part: it’s only about $100.
Bad parts: Can’t really see an easy way to access the stuff externally (if I’m remote) and no additional USB connectors to extend storage with external drives.
Tahoma Toelkes (September 21, 2005 @ 9:42 pm)
I saw this device in Frye’s the other day and was tempted to buy it on the spot. However, looking deeper, I’m glad I didn’t. Since it requires special software, it wouldn’t be easily useable between my Windows, OS X, and Linux machines. Oh well. As you said, the price is nice, but I guess I’ll continue to stick with my Linux Samba server…
– Tahoma
bmonday(dot)com (October 5, 2005 @ 12:41 am)
iBackup Test Drive
russ (December 18, 2005 @ 11:57 pm)
looks like craaap! Garbage man it is obviously garbage, Raid? Pshaw!
Ken (March 16, 2006 @ 5:02 pm)
I am the unproud owner of one of these units. The software provided has a tendancy to lose a drive after it is set up. It is also incompatible with MS Word documents which have text pasted into them from another word document. The pasted material is replace with small squares upon saving to the SC 101. I have taken it out of service except for limited backups.
John (December 8, 2006 @ 11:20 pm)
I bought one of these and returned it as ‘not working’. Luckily buy.com honored this and gave me a refund. Even if you get past the proprietary software issue, and the ‘only works with a certain subset of drives’ issue, the unit is not visible to software on different subnets. Absolute drek.
Jon (December 16, 2006 @ 10:48 pm)
I am afraid I can’t recommend one of these units either. Large file copies tend to lock up the Windows XP system attempting to perform the file transfer. Indeed, the system seems to lock up even if the Zetera service is running, but disabled (best solution is to disable it and forget about using the SC-101).
In my opinion, the unit is a piece of junk, and does great dis-service to the NetGear brand. It should be recalled until they can fix the numerous problems with it.
jon.
Jon (December 16, 2006 @ 10:49 pm)
Clarification of above. I meant to say “running, but otherwise idle” rather than “running but disabled”.
jon.