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It is highly debatable whether this thing is worth it if it was completely free. To setup the mirror again, you have to wipe both drives and restart the whole process, you can not mirror in the middle and just make another copy.2) It uses a proprietary file system so if your unit fails you can't just plug it into another external enclosure and read the data. Even if it is on sale. Thats right, and there is no easy recovery option, the user interface is terrible. And the serial number activation does not work, so the bundled software is not useable. Calling netgear support gets clueless people who wants you to rebuild your enclosure when all I need is an activation code for bundled software. I got this for less than $50 thinking it was a deal, and since I only wanted it as a backup for photos and video, speed was not of the highest priority.But even with such lowered expectations this storage unit completely fails. 1) In less than 3 days the mirroring failed.
You can't just setup ur drives as internal drives.3) After reading some support forums, it turns out the mirroring is pretty much fubar and everyone recommends against using it. in conclusion, avoid like the plague, and especially avoid any temptations due to lowered prices. Do not buy this or you are very likely going to regret it. I set it up in mirror mode with two 1.5T samsung harddrives and started putting my files on it. So I decide to scrap the mirroring and do the backups myself using the provided smartsync software.
Netgear is rather silent about this and does not even claim to have any 64 bit drivers in the works. This device does not work with 64 bit Vista, despite what Netgear advertises. I'm returning it.
You can't access from machines unless you install special custom drivers on each machine. This device, despite being described as supporting 'network storage', is not a NAS. Needless to say, such drivers don't appear to exist for linux.
They playback from the network drive and it plays back very smooth. I am using mine to store media files including movies. My only surprise was that it didn't allow for RAID 0. Strange to hear about other folks troubles with this product. I didn't experience anything bad at all and am quite happy with the gigabit performance. The fact that the software makes the drive appear as a local drive was helpful too, otherwise I would get copyright violation errors from some download sites.
It is also nice because the end user cannot "disconnect" the drive easily. The sc101t boots and puts a DHCP assigned address to the hard drives. Not scientific but gave me an example of what to expect. I didn't like this.It does make the drive look like a local drive to each computer after installing the software to each computer. This worked very well.
This is nice because some off site backup routines only will backup local drives. not much of a performance hit. I tested copying files from a workstation to a "real" 2003 server with 1 hard drive and the 466mb files took 1min 26sec. I was looking for a way to share files between 3 computers without having to rely on one of the computers being turned on or hung. I copied the same files to the netgear with 2 500gb mirrored (raid 1) and it took 1 min 42 sec.
You must have dhcp running and you cannot assign a static address.
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