Review on Cisco-Linksys NAS200: Enhanced Network Storage System with Dual Bays by David Bar

I bought this to provide RAID 1 backup storage for our entire home, to have a centralized location to access email and other user files, and a network server for mine external USB drives to be . While I was able to get the device working, there were a few issues that I wish I'd known about before purchasing: 1) Device access is slow. A lot of people have mentioned this before, but I figured it was only for large file transfers that I could live with. However, just accessing the hard drive is painful. For example, when I try to access a hard drive in Vista, it takes 30-45 seconds for the hard drive to show up. Very annoying. I wanted to move all user folders (desktop, documents, etc.) to the NAS200, but I expected system performance to lag if I had to wait for access every time I changed the desktop or edited documents. I'll probably just move the "Pictures" and "Downloads" folders to disk for now. 2) USB ports only support read access when the external drive is formatted in NTFS. Why they didn't make the device capable of writing to NTFS drives is beyond me. Not being able to find this deficiency in the manual, I did a little research and found that in order to write to USB drives, they must be pre-existing FAT/FAT32 drives or formatted by the NAS200 (it formats to FAT32). . Since I have 1.5TB of space on two external NTFS formatted USB drive arrays, cleaning the drives, reformatting them, and then copying them back to the drives is a big undertaking. network storage device and connect my two USB arrays to it. I will then use my NAS200 to provide secondary storage for important items or folders that are rarely accessed. If I get other external drives, I can format them with the NAS200. I know some groups are working on hacks like they did for NSLU2, but I prefer my products to work out of the box and I don't have to rewrite the firmware to get them working properly.