Review on Zyxel NAS326: Personal Cloud Storage [2-Bay] with Remote Access & Media Streaming – Disks Not Included by Katherine Peterson

I will update the review later but felt the need to write a review and maybe help others with their NAS326 setup. IF YOU CANNOT SETUP WITH FINDME.ZYXEL OR THE NAS STARTER UTILITY, RESTART YOUR DEVICE BY LONG HOLDING THE RESET BUTTON *AT LEAST 2 BEEPS*. THE DEVICE WILL BE RESET AND YOU CAN PERFORM THE FIRST TIME SETUP USING THE NAS STARTER UTILITY ON THE ZYXEL WEBSITE. I used to have a Lenovo ix2-dl which I mainly used to back up my hypervisor VMs. It stopped working after a little over a year and never had much bandwidth or speed. I ordered this because of the price as I don't need any of the special features that consumer NAS come with today. After getting this, I planned on quickly plugging it in, plugging an external SSD drive into one of the USB 3.0 ports on the back, and setting it up remotely since I had to go in a hurry. After connecting I looked at the instructions, tried it via the Findme wizard, it didn't help. Then I tried to use the NAS Starter Utility but it didn't work. I also tried accessing the web interface, didn't work. I had an IP address (192.168.1.5) I could ping but nothing connected. I spent more than 4 hours getting this thing to work. I plugged it into another router, powered off/rebooted and installed two hard drives. Nothing worked. There is very little documentation on the subject, so Google didn't help. I ended up reading the user manuals for the older 325v2 which said that using the NAS starter utility didn't work properly. I received a configuration error message when trying to use the app. So I decided to try resetting it again, this time observing it to see the exact resetting process. Holding the button for 1 beep will reset the *password*, holding it for 2 or more beeps will reset all device settings! After restarting the device I had a real IP address from my DHCP pool and was able to connect normally. Zyxel needs to work on the documentation before the product is released. UPDATE: I would only recommend this as a backup/archive system. It is too slow when serving large video files. I copied the same video files to an external hard drive and streamed them through my hypervisor to a VM acting as a Samba/FTP share and I was able to watch all the videos without buffering or crashing when run on my phone. Fire TV etc.