Review on 💾 NETGEAR SC101 Storage Hub by Jacob Kuntz

Advantages: Nice compact form factor. Cheap. You can connect 2 hard drives. Large hard drives (500GB) seem to be fine, which is not the case in many other cases. Calm. Disadvantages: very poor throughput. I mean very bad. In the toilet. I was able to enter data faster. Okay maybe not the last but I put 2 Hitachi 500GB drives in one and it took 3 days to transfer 250GB of data to one of the drives. This is less than 1MB/s. I found one review that did throughput testing and the SC101 falls face down on large files, which is basically what I'm trying to use it for. With large files, the test dropped to 0.6 MB/s. I wasn't expecting it to be a speed daemon that is a network drive, but I was expecting more than _that_. If I don't see the data integrity issues that some others have seen, this is my number 1 issue with this device. SC101 requires their drivers to be loaded on the computer and they only support Windoze boxes. Netgear mumbles something about Linux drivers, but so far it's idle talk. There are still some issues with the software, although it seems better than it used to be. Installing on a computer running Win2K SP4 caused a continuous BSOD->reboot->BSOD->reboot etc. I think this was because the wireless LAN started up on that computer after running the SC101 utility, which is a connects to the SC101 drives. Going into safe mode, removing the SC101 utility from startup, and running the utility manually after the computer boots up seems to have fixed the problem, but what a pain. WinXP SP2 doesn't seem to have this problem (at least for me). There have been many reports of data corruption and lost files when trying to mirror drives, but I haven't tried it. So far, an attempt to update the SC101 with the latest firmware has not been successful. There are no good error messages to understand why, it just fails. I haven't tried Netgear's support for this, but from the looks of it, their support is somewhere between terrible and non-existent. If you go to Netgear's user support forum, it's obvious that _users_ will have the burden of finding solutions to problems, and real support personnel are nowhere to be found. Terrible thermal calculation. I don't know where the hard drive case manufacturers get the idea that it's acceptable to encapsulate a drive in a case with no ventilation, but it seems a lot of them do. This is likely coming from hard drive manufacturers who like the idea of heat severely limiting their drives' MTBF so they can sell more of them. The Hitachi drives I've used are actually pretty power efficient so the unit doesn't overheat, but some of the more power hungry drives can have issues. Netgear's solution to their terrible thermal scheme is to stop drives from sleeping. It doesn't help if the discs are accessed frequently and is the equivalent of putting a band-aid on a large gash. I can cut a few slots in their top and bottom "heaters" to provide at least some convection cooling. I wish the box had an internal power supply rather than an external goiter, but that would compound the temperature issues. I wanted something small, low power, available for multiple computers, with lots of memory so I didn't have to keep the server running all the time. The SC101 sort of does that, which is why I'm not giving it a 1 star, but with all its issues and pathetic throughput, I can't recommend it. Let's hope Netgear takes action and the new firmware can fix some of these issues.