Edimax BR-6215SRG review

This little box looks like a normal wireless router - in fact it looks a bit dull.

But we'll let you into a secret, there's much more to this router than meets the eye - it can turn a normal USB hard drive into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive.

Network Attached Storage is just a fancy name for a hard drive that you can connect to your network. It's a handy way of sharing files among several PCs without having to leave one of them on all the time to act as a server. NAS boxes cost a lot more than plain old USB hard drives. For instance, you can pick up a 320GB USB drive for around £70 - a 320GB NAS box will cost you about twice as much. So if this product can turn a USB hard drive into Network Attached Storage, it will save you a lot of money.

We won't keep you in suspense, the BR-6215SRG worked fine. We plugged a 30GB USB hard drive into the Edimax, logged onto the router's presentation page and told it that the hard disk was there, and that was about all there was to it. To connect the device to the shared drive we used the Add A Network Place Wizard in Windows XP. The entire setup process took around five minutes. The only limitation we came across was the router's inability to give full write access to drives formatted with the NTFS file system - the normal file system for Windows XP and Vista.

Performance was, however, distinctly middling - it averaged 7Mbits/s in our file transfer test. We'd normally expect around double this. To be fair subjectively, the connection felt fine - we could surf the internet and browse the attached hard disk without problem. But transfers to and from the hard drive were slow. Not unbearably slow, but not great either. Given that the NAS feature is one of the router's big selling points, it would have been nice to have a faster wireless connection speed to make the most of it.

This is an inspired little product. It's easy to use and we had broadband and Wi-Fi set up within minutes. But despite some really great features, its performance could be better.