The Baddest A$$ External Hard Drive Enclosure
May 13th, 2005 by feeling entropy
I’m not a fan of the PPA Metal Gear Box USB 2.0 Hard Drive enclosure. I purchased one, lost thousands of songs due to corrupted data, and now have been hard drive enclosure less for over a week. I sent it back to PPA with hopes of fixing the problem which they seemed far too familiar with when I explained what happened me and a friend of mine who also got screwed by a Metal Gear Box. Why have I been subjected to such torment? Because Netgear hadn’t released this product until now.
The Netgear Storage Central that I saw at the Connections Conference took my breath away. Two IDE drives fit nicely into this white and silver box-o-goodness. Costing only $129.00 for this double shot, I can add my two 250GB Western Digital 7200RPM 8MB buffer hard drives and store half a terabyte over my network. This fatboy plugs into your router and shows up as a network drive. Mirroring, partitioning, and striping are available for each individual need. Expect to see this network storage device in a month. Updates to this will include ‘server qualities’ for example streaming the content to you T.V. while your computer is off.
Makes me feel like a heel for paying $60.00 for a single drive PPA Metal Gear Box USB 2.0 external hard drive enclosure that loses power due to poor chip architecture and corrupts my unmirrored data! (I’ve just started showing my bitterness about this situation, don’t catch me on a bad day!)
May 13th, 2005 at 7:18 am
I need to buy this! Any idea where and when this will be available?
May 13th, 2005 at 8:36 am
expect this baby out within a month or so, according to the Netgear rep.
May 13th, 2005 at 12:08 pm
Please come out in the UK
I so want one of these!
May 16th, 2005 at 1:14 am
Metal Gear boxes _are_ crap. I’ll avoid anything with the Prolific-chip in it. It obviously sux!
May 16th, 2005 at 1:15 am
Oh, my point only applying to Metal Gear boxes. This enclosure is going for a spin as soon as I can get my hands on it! It’s too good to be true.
May 16th, 2005 at 2:13 am
[...] > Article complet: Le serveur NAS Netgear SC101 bientôt disponible 16.05.05 Le serveur NAS Netgear SC101 bientôt disponible [...]
May 16th, 2005 at 2:37 am
[...]
Monday May 16, 2005
Best External HDD Enclosure
This is, by far, the best ever external hard disk drive enclosure. For as inexpensive as it is, and the feat [...]
May 16th, 2005 at 3:22 am
Nice toaster!
May 16th, 2005 at 4:39 am
[...] Engadget posted a quick blurb about Netgear’s newest offering, originally covered at LIVEdigitally. Engadget thinks that the enclosure will run about $129 and Tom’s Networking posted tha [...]
May 16th, 2005 at 9:06 am
I want to know when they’re going to make this baby TiVo compatible!!! I’d love to be able to stream my music to this thing without having to have the TiVo server on my computer.
May 16th, 2005 at 9:53 am
I suffered the same fate my friend.
I updated the firmware though on the chipset and it works fine now.
May 16th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
While this is very cool, Linksys has had a similar-in-concept product for some time now, and this is clearly the “product marketing reaction” from NetGear
http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid=35&scid=43&prid=640
The Linksys product (as you can see) has two USB connections to your drives, rather than stuffing them inside the box proper. You can argue for/against this design – but conceptually, it’s the same idea.
Two drives + product = network storage.
May 16th, 2005 at 2:51 pm
Linksys’s product doesn’t have any RAID capabilities. This article claims that the Netgear will. Also, you’ll save a good deal of money by using “bare” drives.
Also, Linksys isn’t the only one who has consumer level NAS devices. Lacie, Buffalo, and Hawking Technology also have NAS devices.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
[...] ist as an external network drive. The best part? The cost (at $129.00 before the drives) [Check it out]
Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (wi [...]
May 17th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
Will it use gigabit ethernet?
May 17th, 2005 at 4:55 pm
It would be so sick if that could replace my old web server. Just stick 2 40gb hds mirror them and i’m good to go, if someone can get a hacked up apache running ;-p
May 19th, 2005 at 12:24 pm
It looks nice at first glance, but you forgot to mention the proprietary software that needs to be installed on every friggin’ client before they can see the SC101. I was totally ready to buy one and then I found out about that little ‘detail’ on another site.
Let’s hear it for standards!
May 24th, 2005 at 7:08 pm
Mike Frisco> Which site would you be referring to? I’d ready to buy this product too and i’d be bummed if there were some proprietory software that needs to be installed.
June 10th, 2005 at 8:34 pm
Just a shame about the required client software. Was really hoping for a RAID+NAS enclosure like this. Grrr… Also, it’s 10/100 – which blows. A quick google search will confirm.
June 15th, 2005 at 10:50 am
I assumed this NETGEAR can be formatted in NTFS and not FAT32 right? I had bad experience with FAT32 or FAT32 just old school!
July 4th, 2005 at 7:09 am
[...] oring I want. How else might I solve this problem? I could buy a nifty DIY nas box, like NetGear Storage Central, which I cannot find priced anywhere, but they claim the MSRP is $129, so I’ll [...]
August 3rd, 2005 at 11:49 am
I just bought one from http://www.cdw.com $115
August 9th, 2005 at 6:07 am
Stick, what are you impressions? Is it true, do you need to have ’special’ software on the client to use the SC101? How does it perform?
August 17th, 2005 at 7:31 am
Is the SC101 hard facts, technical manual on the net?
September 17th, 2005 at 1:01 am
Any new updates so far?
November 14th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
The only missing thing is another usb jack to share a printer…I cannot see why they didn´t add one…
December 2nd, 2005 at 5:44 pm
Full review at http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Reviews-226-ProdID-SC101.php
User reviews at buy.com: http://www.buy.com/prod/netgear_storage_central_sc101/q/loc//PageFormat/4/10411261.html#creviews
Also, Staples will have them on sale the week of 12/4/04 in the U.S. for $99.94 after rebate. Not a great price considering what’s available online but if you have a Staples Reward check to cash, or a coupon code or anything like that, or have a competitor in your area that has them and does price matching plus some percentage, you could possibly get a better deal.
December 3rd, 2005 at 11:57 am
דיו
So that is what was doing that on דיו. I noticed it about a month ago but so much crap was installed on it from other students. Its really annoying and pissed me off. Looking for דיו, check out our די…
January 27th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
not recommend, only compatible with Microsoft Windows. not compatible with other OS (mac, unix, linux)
February 16th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Heres a question, with all the talk about mirroring your work, music, files, whatever it is that “we” do…. once the NEW technology hits mid summer I am NOT gonna dump 2 large on a new setup right now because the new technology will be making its debut… back to the fact… with said new technology, and whats sure to be a 74 or 150KB Raptor Drive… are we gonna be able to daisy chain these NAS enclosures to pile on the black hole of space that is video, and audio? I.E. 500GB sounds like a LOT… until you start saving 12 Megapixel Photos, TV SHOWS, TONS OF SONGS, etc… sounding like you wanna start at a TB and go from there doesn’t it….. so long winded question in one simple sentence. DAISY CHAIN or NO. THANKS!
April 22nd, 2006 at 5:27 am
My big concern would be Are these units NTSF compatable & Can they be configured to work with an already loaded hard drive?
as most I see are only FAT 32 & want to do a fresh format on an empty drive.
As I currently have 2 120G maxtor drives formated to NTFS with no OS that I am using as network drives, I am looking for a solution that will allow me to simply pop in these drives & configure for network use to plug into my router.
July 10th, 2006 at 9:00 am
What’s up with it being Windows only though?
No LInux or MAC support? If its on a network, I want it to support everything…
August 13th, 2006 at 4:35 am
I need a external hard drive I would like to be under a $100 I had purchased a WD passport but it wont work on one of my computers that had ME and now has xp with fat32 can you tell me what hard drive that I can move from computer to computer for a fat32 operating system Thanks
August 7th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
This product defines P.o.S.
Bad execution of a poor design.
To add to the misery of ownership, Netgear tech support was incompetent – at best.
Dig a little deeper in Google to find out how crappy this little sh*tbox turned out for other uninformed buyers.
October 11th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
I’ve been in IT for near 30 years and this is thing is a nightmare. Stability issues, inability to connect, no compatibility with Linux, Mac or Unix. It only takes PIO 6 drives (which you have to dig through the fine print to find out) and absolute sloppy utilities interface. I have no idea what the engineers were smoking when they designed this thing but they definitely created a monster. I can not believe Netgear continues its slide into super junk consumer products with this garbage.
June 5th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
After working with this device for a while, I have now decided its best application is a desktop decoration after being modded to look like a pig.
Software is lousy, over-heats, is slow and to top it off has a habit of disapearing off my network.