Review on SSK 4TB Personal Cloud NAS Storage with Auto-Backup, Wireless Remote Access - Includes Hard Drive for Phone/Tablet PC/Laptop, Ideal for Home Office by Mark Greenwood

This is an overview of the SSM-F100 4TB drive1. Design and Connectivity This is a sleek, aesthetically pleasing piece of hardware with a very small footprint. I bought it to use as direct attached storage (via USB to a Windows 10 PC) and network storage (via an ethernet cable to my home router). DAS is used for PC backup while NAS is used for mobile device backup, namely Android phones and iPads.2. DAS setup The DAS connection is very smooth. As soon as I connect the USB cable from the F100 to my PC, a drive immediately appears with the next available drive letter. The capacity is 4TB, which is exactly 4,000,768,323,584 bytes, with a small amount used for the system and some empty folders preinstalled to easily categorize future backups. The drive is formatted as NTFS and works fine with my Win 10 Pro 64-bit OS. The internal hard drive is a 3.5" drive, but I can't identify the make or model number. Conveniently, the drive has a USB host port so you can connect another USB drive to it. However, I can only see the secondary device when the F100 is connected to my home router via an Ethernet cable as a NAS device, not when it is directly connected to a PC via USB.3. Setting up the NAS First, follow the instructions in the included user manual to install the SSKCloud app on your mobile device and give the app permission to access your device's storage (so that the app can read and write to folders). I used my Android phone to initialize the drive for network access. Then download and install SSKCloud.exe from SSK website "eng.ssk.cn". Run SSKCloud.exe and click "Manage Samba" in the top right corner of the screen to start SMB access. Windows Explorer is displayed with the network share "share_sda1" visible. The volume is now a network resource. If another USB drive is currently connected to the host port, it will also appear as "share_sdb1". Files between PC and F100 can be easily transferred with Windows Explorer, both DAS and NAS. No problem. Mobile devices are different... 4. Connect and transfer files with a mobile device. First, connect the F100 to your home router with an Ethernet cable. Second, connect your device to your router via Wi-Fi and launch the SSKCloud app. It should "see" the F100 since both are on the same LAN. In this case, all folders in F100 as well as folders on your device are visible. You can then transfer files freely. In my case it worked with 2 of my Android phones. However, my iPad could not "see" the F100 over WiFi LAN. I need to use remote access to access the F100 from my iPad. To do this, you need to know the UID and password to log into the device. Once the F100 is connected "remotely", launch the Files app on the iPad, select the option "Connect to Server" (SMB://xxxx) and then you can transfer files between the F100 and the iPad.5. 5 Star Customer Support During my testing, Jessie from SSK Support was very helpful with troubleshooting tips. The time zone difference is actually in my favor. The emails I sent to Jesse at night got a reply from Jesse in the morning, giving me plenty of time to test the scripts.