Cool Yule rating: 3.5 stars $189.99
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Description: This is the latest version of Netgear’s Storage Central line of storage enclosures, which lets you “make your own” network-attached storage (NAS) device by just inserting one or two 3.5-inch SATA drives of any capacity into the enclosure. This provides for easy upgradeability, when you run out of space you can just go up to the next size and pop in a new drive.
The device has a few great features. It is a vast upgrade from the SC101, which only supported IDE drives. With the greater capabilities of SATA drives the Storage Central Turbo can now handle greater capacity and deliver data faster. The SATA drives can be used independently or mirrored for data protection, but they cannot be pooled together for greater capacity.
The user interface was very customer friendly and easy to use, but it lacked some advanced features. The Storage Central Manager application scans the network for the IP address of the drives and can then manage the settings for the drives. Different installation methods allow you to set up sharing for multiple computer connectivity and individual drive partition mounting, however each computer connecting to the appliance does require a small applet to connect to the device, which can be secured with basic password protection.
The biggest problem was that when I wished to configure a static IP address to the device, I found that this was not possible, and in fact the device was obtaining five DHCP addresses. While this may not be a concern for most users, the lack of flexibility was frustrating. Overall it was a speedy and reliable NAS device, but lacked some basic functionality that I would have liked to see.
