Battleangel

A really cool gadget from Netgear. I actually thought about getting one until I came to my senses. The Storage Center, unlike ordinary NAS drives, promised “Z-SAN”, Zetera Storage Area Network, which essentially adds expandability and fault tolerance at an affordable price.
So far so good. But here is the snag. The SN doesn’t just plug and play its way into a local network. No. Every computer that wants to access the SN needs to install a driver (which is only Win2K/XP). Well that doesn’t make sense. But then I realized that it wasn’t so much because of the features as it was the proprietary approach. That is just weak. An enclosure like this should just be available on the network, regardless of whether you install drivers or not. There must be some way to do storage over IP without additional drivers. I’m gonna have another look at the available NAS products.

And judging from the comments over at Engadget the problems don’t end here. Apparently it’s picky with hard drives. No ATA5 or earlier models work according to Netgear. And it’s slow. The file system is proprietary as well so just installing your old hard drive will not do I guess. And there is neither a scandisk nor a defrag utility available at this moment. So basically cool technology that is utterly useless.

Reviews: eWEEK, Networkcomputing