NETGEAR SC101 Storage Central

It was great for me since I have old type HDD's so I got to use them once again... and I am using the two 500gbs in it so that I can tie it into my Local Home Network and store Pictures from my phone.

I like Netgear products. I've owned wireless routers and networking cards from Netgear and they always worked perfectly. As I am trying to create mass storage for my digital music library I thought this would be a great addition to my network. I bought the unit from Amazon and two Seagate ATA/IDE 500Gb drives and was ready to enter the world of network storage.Unfortunately, the product did not install on the first attempt. No big deal, I thought. Looking closely at the install it appeared that the installation software had formatted my disks (more about this later) and sort of assigned network addresses for them but the drives were not visible from the mangement software. The install strongly suggests checking for updates and using the latest version from the web. I tried that - same results only now the operational software version didn't match the management software version and I got a message saying I needed to remove some SATA drivers first. I checked Netgear's online forum and I noticed that not one of the members logged into the SC101 section reported a successful install, even after trying many suggestions from different people. I tried every suggestion listed at least five times and the unit never even came CLOSE to working. I worked on this thing for two months or so with no progess at all.I am a computer professional - programmer, analyst, dba and power PC user with over 25 years experience and this is literally the first product I have ever given up on installing. It turns out that the SC101 formats your disks in some proprietary way that makes them unreadable by windows. Say you archive about twenty thousand of your favorite songs on the SC101 including your entire vinyl collection which takes a couple of hours per record to digitize and the SC101 blows up. Thats right - you cannot pull the disks out and use them in a Window system - your only option is to buy another SC101! Also, MANY people on the SC101 foruim reported that they had lost all their data just using the blasted thing.I gave the SC101 to goodwill with a warning taped on the box. I read a suggestion on the forum that all you need for a NAS device is an old computer stripped down to only Windows XP, a network card and a massive hard drive. Format the hard drive to match your other drives (FAT32,NTFS, whatever) set your sharing privileges and rock out.I guess it comes as no surprise by now that I rate the SC101 as the worst piece of hardware I ever bought. I think that Netgear should recall all of them and give us our noney back.

This unit would rate 5 stars if only Netgear had decided to provide W-7 drivers. Installation was simple and the units are quite stable (have 2 with 500gb in each). Hooking up to a network is a no-brainer but you will have to install Netgear's propriety drivers and utilities on all your PCs to access and manage the drives.Since installation, I have had no down-time issues and every XP computer works well with the boxes. As we are converting to W-7 units, I may have to excess these boxes but only because Netgear does not have, nor do they plan to release updated drivers.

Pros:Nice small form factor.Cheap.Can connect 2 hard drives.Seems to handle large hard drives (500GB) OK, which a lot of the other enclosures don't.Quiet.Cons:Throughput is very poor. I mean really bad. In the toilet. I could type the data in faster. OK, maybe not that last one, but I put 2 Hitachi 500GB drives in one and it took 3 days to transfer 250GB of data on to one of the drives. That's less than 1MB/sec. I found a review that did throughput tests and the SC101 really falls on its face with large files, which is mostly what I'm attempting to use it for. The test got down to 0.6MB/sec on large files. I didn't expect this to be a speed demon being a network drive, but I expected better than _this_. If I don't see the data integrity problems that some others have seen, this is my number 1 problem with this device.The SC101 requires their drivers to be loaded on the computer and they only support Windoze boxes. Netgear is mumbling something about having Linux drivers someday, but so far that's vaporware.Software still has some problems, though apparently it's better than it used to be. Installing on a Win2K SP4 machine caused a continuous BSOD->reboot->BSOD->reboot, etc. I think that was happening because the wireless LAN on that machine was getting started after the SC101 utility that connects to the SC101 drives started. Going into safe mode, removing the SC101 utility from startup, and manually starting the utility after the machine is up and running seems to have fixed the problem, but what a pain. WinXP SP2 doesn't seem to have that problem (for me, at least). There's a lot of reports of data corruption and lost files when attemtping to mirror drives, but I haven't tried that.So far, attempting to update the SC101 with the latest firmware fails. No good error messages to help figure out why, it just fails. I haven't tried Netgear support on this issue yet, but by all accounts their support is somewhere between terrible and non-existent. If you go to Netgear's user support forum, apparently the _users_ are left with the burden of figuring out ways around problems and actual support personell are nowhere to be found.Terrible thermal design. I don't know where hard drive case manufacturers get the idea that sealing a drive up in an enclosure with zero ventilation is acceptible, but a lot of them seem to be doing it. It probably comes from the hard drive manufacturers that like the idea of high temperature severly limiting the MTBF of their drives so they can sell more of them. The Hitachi drives I'm using are actually pretty frugal with power usage, so the unit doesn't get overly hot, but some of the more power hungry drives may have issues. Netgear's fix for their awful thermal design is to spin down the drives when idle. This doesn't help if the drives are accessed often and is the equivalent of a band-aid on a big gaping wound. I may cut some slots in their top and bottom "heat sinks" to at least get a little convection cooling going.I wish the box had an internal power supply rather than the external goiter, but that would have made the thermal issues even worse.I wanted something small, low power, accessible by multiple computers, with a lot of storage so I wouldn't have to keep a server powered up all the time. The SC101 is sort of doing that so I'm not giving it 1 star, but with all the problems it has and the pathetic throughput, I can't recommend it. Hopefully Netgear will get its act together and newer firmware can fix some of these problems.