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Vantec
NexStar LX NAS Hard Drive Enclosure
The Install:
Installing the drive is about as
painless as it gets, set the jumpers on the drive to a single or master
drive setup, plug the drive into the IDE cable, plug in the Molex power
connector, drop it into the enclosure, attach the four mounting screws
and viola. It's ready for a test drive.
I used a Western Digital 80 GB
drive I had laying around, you can use whatever you want, so you can
have a central location for all those files you want to have available
on the network without ever having to worry about saving them when you
reload the OS on your box after a particularly grueling overclocking
session! Here's a close-up of the temperature sensor. They recommend
putting the sensor in front of the hard drive. The way the wire is,
that is about the only option you have.
The Software:
Once installed the web based menu
system was a breeze to setup and get the drive operational. One thing I
noticed was that the setup pages looked better in Firefox than they did
in Internet Explorer. No great loss for me, I practice safe hex with
Firefox. If you caught it, when I did the install I used an 80GB
drive. After using it, I decided it really needed a nice fat 200GB
unit. Swapping the drives was easy and simple, just the way it should
be. It even provides a DHCP server if you are so inclined.
After I installed the drive,
connected the enclosure to the network and powered it up, it was
immediately available using the UNC path \\storage. For the novice user
this is a huge plus. Putting in a new drive that is unformatted, you
will need to format it obviously. Yes, they have a option for that
too. One caveat is that for a NAS drive the drive has to be formatted
FAT32, if you are using the USB connection then NTFS will be just fine.
Sharing folders on the drive is
point and click easy. Here is the SMB menu so the folders will show up
as a UNC drive on the network.
FTP is just as easy. Point and
click interface, which again for the novice users makes this usable.
If you have mixed users on your
network and want to protect your files. No problem, you can set up
passwords for folders in both the SMB and FTP interfaces. Here is the
SMB menu that comes up after you share your folder and click on the
password button.
Here is the FTP option that is
displayed after you create the user, then click on the modify button.
FTP seems to be a little more flexible, which for me makes this a viable
option for sharing files at a LAN party. Share only those files you
want to, hide the rest.
Conclusion:
Installation, setup and use is a
breeze for this little dynamo. For such a small unit, the setup options
were pretty flexible and easy to setup making this more than just a
external hard drive. Sharing of files has never been easier! You can
use either the SMB (windows) interface and map a drive letter to the
device or you can use the FTP interface with the client of your choice.
Price on NewEgg is $69.99 with $6.19 shipping. Seems kind of spendy,
but again this is more than just your run of the mill external hard
drive. One thing to keep in mind with a NAS is that the throughput is
at network speeds. The manual states max network speed is 100 mbps
where the USB 2.0 speed is 480 mbps. I ran a test using a 630 megabyte
file. USB 2.0 took 28 seconds, the same file over the network took 2
minutes and 38 seconds. If you are a speed demon, you might choose to
use the USB interface. If you are willing to wait a little bit, then
the network interface will do the job with the added benefit of the
ability of locating it wherever a network connection is available..
Either way, this unit rocks!
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Club
Overclocker Rating |
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Innovation: |
9.0
out of 10 |
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Performance: |
9.0 out of 10 |
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Quality: |
10.0
out of 10 |
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Stability: |
N/A |
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Overclocking: |
N/A |
|
Software/Drivers Pack: |
9.0 out of 10 |
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Value: |
7.0 out of 10 |
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Overall Rating
8.5 |
 |
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Skill Level |
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Project Skill Level
(10 being hardest) |
4
out of 10 |
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