NETGEAR SC101TNA Storage Central Turbo


Product Feature
- Storage Central Turbo is a flexible, upgradeable way to store digital information
- Insert one or two 3.5-inch SATA drives of any capacity to get started
- Functions just like a local disk drive; even assigns a new letter drive once added to your PC
- Advanced mirroring backup system and synchronization software protects against data loss
- Device measures 5.91 x 5.74 x 6.90 inches (WxHxD)
Product Description
Netgear Storage Central TurboNETGEAR SC101TNA Storage Central Turbo Review
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.
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