Netgear SC101 review

Netgear's SC101 lets you store your files centrally on a network. It comes empty, so you can install your own choice of Parallel ATA hard disks. This might sound complex, but the drives simply slot into the dual slots and don't need any screws.

The SC101 isn't a standard network storage device; it's actually a storage area network (SAN) device. The main difference is that a SAN product needs a special driver, which is supposed to improve performance. Netgear's software installs the driver and helps you configure your storage space via its wizard. From the available disk space, you can create new logical drives. These appear in Windows as normal drives, and can either be shared for other users or kept private. Creating a drive is similar to partitioning a new hard disk.

When you create a drive, you can choose to mirror its contents. Normally these systems require you to have two disks of the same size, but the SC101 requires only that the free space on the other disk is the same size or greater than the size of your new drive. In short, you get the protection without the normal restrictions. You also get a copy of SmartSync Pro backup software, which intelligently synchronises only those files that have changed, saving on network bandwidth.

We installed our SC101 with a single Hitachi DeskStar 160GB hard disk. Our large file test wrote files at 5.63MB/s and read files at 6.9MB/s; small files were written at 0.4MB/s and read at 1.42MB/s. This is in line with other network devices we've seen that don't use a dedicated driver.

Netgear's SC101 is not the easiest of products to get to grips with, but its integration with Windows, private drives and free backup software make it a flexible and intelligent choice for sharing and backing up files over a network.

Author: David Ludlow