great space toaster

With the need for storage getting more and more significant as time goes by (downloading has got to be one of the most important activities one can do when surfing the Net), the method of accessing these tons of data is also important. I got tired of swapping data in and out of hard drives, pulling them in and out of USB cases and desktop cages. My first option was to get a 4 bay firewire case from Firewire Depot. But days became weeks and weeks became months, and I don't think I was too keen on the idea of lugging the whole thing around. It would be fast if it were Firewire, but ...

Then NetGear comes out with a SAN (storage area network) solution. SAN is much more localized than a WAN wherein you dispense with the server itself, and just have a couple of hard drives sitting there to be accessed. NetGear's SC101 is practically 2-bay drive case, with its own proprietary software that allows it to be treated and accessed like a server (just connect it to your standard router) and the drives show up on your PC just like you mapped them (in a normal Windows server network configuration).


On the great space toaster, get onboard, we'll explore

The whole thing looks like a toaster and with good reason, the top and the bottom are both heavy-duty heatsinks which helps because having two drives in there spinning like mad would make things hot in a hurry. Its easy to just pop in the drives, load and lock (with a coin).

it's so easy, even a caveman can do it (apologies to Geico)

The tricky part, which bit me in the rear, is that it slipped my mind that the SC101's proprietary design made it incompatible with how Windows sets up a drive. In short, it will format the drives for you (and wipe out existing data in them). So there went my Popular episodes and AVI files. damn. You have to start out with blank or empty hard drives (to which end I had to do some more file-moving), and after that you'll end up with storage space like you have your own personal server.

A couple of other annoying things would be the internal drive-to-drive copying rate (it was faster copying files from an external USB drive to the SC101), the inherent incompatibility (you can't just take out a working drive from the SC101 and just plug it in your desktop or external case, after formatting and all), plus the tendency for the network to drop sometimes (maybe its my wireless network - more tests to be done). But in the end, it seems worth it (not to return it) because I now have a central repository (for music and movies - thats a little more than half a terrabyte) and I don't have to swap drives in and out of my one trusty external case anymore. Since price drops a lot quicker these days, its not unusual for HDs to be accumulating (especially in some geek's house). So SAN and other storage solutions have to be improved on.


cable modem (in the back), wireless router, and toaster (tricycle and speaker not included)

550 Gb? my first PC only had 40 Mb. How things change in 11 years.