💾 NETGEAR SC101 Storage Hub Review

In theory this is a great product. I want this to work for me. I have two 200GB Western Digital drives installed. One was already NTFS formatted and the other was brand new. He has successfully formatted both into his own format system. I set it up as a mirror drive system. I copied (DO NOT MOVE) my most important files and photos to it. My files were/are working on my Dell server with a Compaq RAID 5 array - too much power and cooling. Well, about a day later, the mirror disappeared and is…

This is an example of a great idea but lousy execution. Good ideas: (1.) Use two drives in a Raid 1 configuration for data reliability. (2.) Be it a network folder. (3.) Let the customer choose the drives according to their needs and budget. (4.) Make available. This is where good ideas end and lousy implementations begin. Bad Features: (1.) Proprietary file system. If the SC101 itself fails, you will not be able to connect the drive(s) to the PC and recover. You need to buy another SC101. (2.)

I bought the SC101 over a year ago and it has worked well most of the time. However, a month ago I updated the software and firmware on the device and lost access to all my data. NetGear support was of little help. Reading the support forums on the NetGear website, one suggestion was to buy another SC101 and add drives to recover the data, but unfortunately that didn't work. I still don't have my data and repeated attempts to get support from NetGear have been terrible. I make my living as an…

There are some compatibility issues with WinXP, Media Center Edition (at least that's what Netgear Engineering told me)! Be careful. The corrupted data is not the data on the hard drives you install in the SC101. Your computer is damaged. SC101 is not really compatible with WinXP. You must install the Netgear software including its own network drivers. You get an MS warning that it's not MS certified, but Netgear asks you to install it anyway. The installation goes smoothly. I'm having trouble…

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…