I own one of these things - a Netgear Storage Central NAS. It's basically a case that connects to your home network and is able to hold two hard drives. I think I got it with 300GB of storage when I bought it about a year ago. I will stuff another hard drive into it sometime next year when that 300GB starts to get a bit full.
When I bought it, I had a look at external hard drives that you can connect via USB, and decided that they only make sense if you want to carry a lot of data around with you, or share things without the hassle of setting up an ad-hoc network. They used to be popular at work amongst the technoids that liked to share large volumes of music and movies - everyone would bring their USB hard drive in from home, and then they'd be passed around and everyone would grab a copy of what they wanted, stick it on their portable drive and take it home. It got around the problem of putting copywrited material onto the corporate servers, which would make the company liable for piracy.
I never got into that, since I could never find the time to watch 43 episodes of Battlestar Galactica and 974 Star Trek shows. But I saw it happening from time to time, and was intrigued by the whole process. It also got around the problem of using up your monthly ADSL quota at home - I have a 10gb quota, and I've exceeded it a few times, and I download nada. What must it be like for Dilboids who download like crazy? They must spend 26 days a month with their bandwidth throttled, or they are forking out half their paypacket on 2TB plans and the like.
The USB hard drives were also great for people that were stuck with laptops with measly hard drives. I remember when a laptop was lucky to come with a 20GB hard drive. If that was your laptop, it made sense to complement it with say an 80GB portable USB hard drive. Doesn't make so much sense anymore though.
But back to the story at hand. I bought a NAS because I wanted somewhere to stick all my monkey videos. The little monkey by the way is the two year old who is currently stress testing my DVD player by putting it through 100 eject/shove back in cycles. 15 minutes of raw video from my camera takes up 2GB, so I had a choice between culling my videos, compressing them or buying more storage. I don't shoot a huge amount of video - maybe 30 to 60 seconds per week - but it soon adds up. I don't want to compress it and then be pulling it out in 20 years time for his 21st birthday party and find that it looks like rubbish because it was compressed back in the days when storage was scarce.
I also wanted something that we could access from any computer in the house (we had two at the time, but now we have four). So I bought the NAS.
In the early days, it was marvelous. But then along came Vista.....
....and Netgear got lazy and decided not to release some updated drivers for the NAS. I trawled through their forums and found a support message saying that drivers would be released in the first quarter of 2007.... but the year dragged by and nothing came out. I emailed Netgear, I posted messages in their support forums and never got a response. I was becoming seriously annoyed because we have 3 machines running Vista and I had to keep the old one on XP in order to access the NAS, and we couldn't access all the stuff stored on it from the Vista machines. Well, yes we could, but it involved copying the stuff from the NAS to a USB thumb drive on the XP machine, then walking that across to another PC or laptop and copying it off again.
That drove me nuts.
A mate bought a Storage Central unit a bit before I did, and when I told him about the problems I was having, he put off all plans to upgrade his home network. Which is a pity, because for all its faults, I do like Vista. That might be something to do with the new and shiny factor, but I've gone to Vista now and I'm not going back.
Anyway, they finally came out with new drivers on 10 Sept. That's only 6 months or so later than they promised to, and a bloody long time since the release of Vista. Surely it can't take that long to write some new drivers? If it does, it seriously undermines the credibility of Netgear. It's put me off buying anything else from them, and I have bought an awful lot of their low end switches and things in the past.
Of course it's not even a Netgear product. They bought it from Zetera and rebadged it. But if they couldn't be arsed to badger Zetera, then that's their problem. Slack-arsed bastards.
It's working now, so all I need to do is figure out how to sync data from the laptops to the NAS. That's probably another day of rooting around.
No comments:
Post a Comment