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.

There are some compatibility issues with WinXP, Media Center Edition (at least that what Netgear Engineering told me)! Be careful. The data that gets corrupted is not the data on the disks you install in the SC101. It's your computer that gets corrupted.The SC101 is not really compatible with WinXP. You need to install Netgear's software, including there own network drivers. You get the MS warning about not being certified by MS, but Netgear tells you to install anyway.The install goes fine. Problems occur when you create disk partitions on the SC101. Once you do that and reboot your machine, the machine drops to reboot as Windows starts infinitely, before you can do anything (like uninstall). No blue screen, just a reboot. I tried many things to stop this ranging to booting in safe mode, "last known good configuration", etc. I could not uninstall and make machine work again. Finally, I was forced to do a full restore to the day prior to buying this product. "EMC Dantz Retrospect" for backup/restore and, later, during the "please try this" period, "Norton GoBack SafeTry Mode" truly showed their worth!I spoke with Netgear during all this. First, their CS wanted me to install on another machine. I guess they wanted me to relive the experience. When I said "no", they gave me a bad time about not working with them to solve the issue. I got a bit upset and was transferred to Engineering. They told me on the phone, initially, that Win XP, Media Center Edition has had data corruption issues with the SC101, but the engineer working on that problem was not in at the time and would get back to me. Later that day they said Win XP, Media Center Edition was OK.If you insist on buying this product, do the following: install the SW, reboot, create disk partitions, reboot, and transfer a large file to the new partition. If you are happy with the thing, you've been warned.After all, what did I end up doing? I built a small server out of an old computer and the 2 300G drive that I bought for the SC101. I am running Server Elements NASLite+ ( [...] It's great, fast, cost $25, its based on Linux, and works!

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.