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Lindy’s Personal Server Premium is the only NAS enclosure here that takes either SATA or older PATA hard disks. The device contains PATA interface circuitry, but a PATA-to-SATA adaptor is included in the box. Installing a single SATA disk was easy. Unscrewing the side panel, lowering the disk into the bracket, screwing it into place and attaching the adaptor and cables took only a few minutes. The web configuration interface is logically organised, but it refused to lease an IP address from our D-Link router’s DHCP server. It worked fine when we used a different router or assigned an IP address manually. Creating user accounts, organising them into groups and giving them access to only certain folders was simple. The Premium is the only NAS here to support MAC address filtering – a security feature more often seen on routers. You can use the Premium to share a USB disk across a network, but each user has to be granted access privileges for this. A second USB port lets you share a printer, and we had no trouble setting this up. The Premium also supports UPnP if you install a plug-in from the included CD, although our network media player refused to recognise it as a media server, even after we reinstalled the plug-in. The Premium can download files from websites without the aid of a computer, but it uses the web administration interface to add and manage downloads. You don’t want to give every user access to this or they could tamper with other settings. The Premium wasn’t particularly fast in our file-transfer benchmarks, but it was consistent. It copied both large and small files at around 12MB/s. It’s not ideal if you regularly copy huge amounts of data but it’s quick enough for occasional and less demanding storage needs.
Lindy’s Personal Server Premium isn’t particularly fast and it has configuration issues. However, it’s inexpensive, easy to assemble and takes either PATA or SATA disks, making it one of the better NAS enclosures here.
