EZY Technologies MyXerver MX3600 1TB review

The MyXerver MX3600 is the first network-attached storage (NAS) device we've seen from external hard disk manufacturer EZY.

The Apple-style glossy white case is both attractive and compact. It can get very warm, though, so you'll have to place it in a well-ventilated area. Despite costing a very reasonable £140, it has a large storage capacity of 1TB.

Configuring the MyXerver isn't particularly hard, but it could be easier, as the web configuration interface is confusing. The controls for creating password-protected user accounts and organising them into groups are especially baffling, although we doubt most home users will need these. One potentially useful option is the ability to assign users storage quotas so they don't hog all the disk space. Another is the ability to schedule automatic startup and shutdown times to save electricity, although you can't set different times for different days of the week.

Many NAS devices claim to be able to stream music to iTunes over your network, but this is one of the few we've seen recently that actually managed this. It also had no trouble streaming music and video to a UPnP network media player.

The MyXerver can share the contents of a USB disk across your network, but it refused to share our Samsung USB laser printer. The patchy documentation isn't much help as it makes little mention of the print server feature. There's no remote access via a web browser, but it can be configured as an FTP server, so you can still get at your files when you're away from home.

Usefully, the MyXerver can also download files from a web, FTP or BitTorrent site without the aid of a computer. Unlike many NAS devices we've seen, the controls for managing downloads are separate from the rest of the web configuration interface. This means you can let other users on your network use it to download files without giving them access to other settings. The interface lacks the advanced options found in most Windows BitTorrent programs, though, and you can't set the MyXerver to shut down once it has finished a download.

We were disappointed with the MyXerver's performance in our file-transfer tests. It copied both large and small files at an average speed of around 5MB/s, which is slower than most NAS devices and many USB flash drives. Western Digital's similarly priced 1TB MyBook World Edition NAS is twice as fast at writing files and three times as fast when reading them.

EZY's MyXerver is inexpensive at just 14p per gigabyte and has several useful features, but its slow file-copying performance lets it down. You could overlook this if you need an iTunes server and a download manager, but for speedy day-to-day access to your data the MyBook remains our recommended NAS.

Author: Alan Lu