Net Drives

The Products

The ten NAS devices and networked hard drives here range widely in features and capacity--from the $90 Linksys Network Storage Link, a bring-your-own-drive adapter that we tested with a $380, 300GB Maxtor drive, to the $749, 250GB Linksys EtherFast Network Attached Storage EFG 250, which has extensive security features, print serving, routing, and a second open drive bay for adding storage. All the devices we tested support PCs and Macs, and in most cases, Linux systems.

While most of the products are available in a range of prices and capacities, we found the sweet spot to be about 250GB with a street price around $399, as in the Buffalo LinkStation, our home-use pick (which we also found great for business use). Products vary in their footprint, as well, from book-size devices such as the Ximeta NetDisk to rack-mounted units such as the LaCie Ethernet Disk.

NAS devices for small businesses have one key feature that the home-oriented products do not: password protection of individual folders. The home-oriented networked storage units, such as the Iomega and Ximeta devices, allow anyone with access to the drive to read anything on that drive. In an office environment, private folders are a necessity, and six of the devices in our review are business class: the Buffalo LinkStation, the LaCie Ethernet Disk, the Linksys EtherFast NAS, the Linksys Network Storage Link, the Snap Appliance Snap Server 1100, and the Tritton Wireless NAS.

Business-class NAS devices we looked at tended to cost more and offer more capacity. Our favorite in this class was Snap Appliance's 250GB Snap Server 1100, which has the most sophisticated file-sharing features of the bunch. Next in line was the 250GB Buffalo LinkStation, a feature-packed unit whose cost per gigabyte compares with that of bare-bones models. It offers built-in backup software, print serving, password-protected user accounts for file sharing, and two USB 2.0 ports (one of them for adding an external hard drive). It is so easy to use that it's a good choice for home networks as well.

In the middle of the pack, the 250GB Linksys EtherFast NAS EFG 250 has a second internal drive bay, a print server, and gigabit ethernet. This unit was a top performer when we used it with a gigabit network. LaCie's rack-mountable 160GB Ethernet Disk has USB 1.1 (not USB 2.0) and FireWire ports for adding more storage in the form of external drives.

Linksys's Network Storage Link, a bring-your-own-storage adapter that we tested with Maxtor's 300GB OneTouch II external USB 2.0 hard drive, is a great value. It comes with two USB 2.0 ports so you can add a second drive to expand capacity or to back up the first drive.

Bringing up the rear was the 200GB Tritton Wireless NAS. It's limited to six shared folders that you can't delete, although you can assign individual passwords to them. It has no print serving or expandability, and it comes with confusing documentation. It includes Genie Soft backup software and serves as a Wi-Fi access point, both of which don't make up for its poor usability and performance.

Home Storage

For home use, we looked at five small or medium-size networkable hard drives and NAS units with simple setup, good backup features, reasonable performance, and low cost: the 250GB Buffalo LinkStation (we rated it for small business also); the Iomega Network Hard Drive and Iomega NAS 100d (both 160GB); and the Ximeta NetDisk and Ximeta NetDisk Office (both 120GB). Entry-level NAS devices start at $200 for 120GB. The clear winner was the Buffalo LinkStation, thanks to its low price and ease of use.

The inexpensive and easy-to-use Ximeta NetDisk and Ximeta NetDisk Office were top performers, but they lack the print serving, expansion ports, and password protection that the Buffalo LinkStation offers. With the Ximeta products, all users get access to all files on the disk, although you can write-protect certain folders. The products share the same software and have similar features, except that the NetDisk Office adds an eight-port ethernet switch and a security lock slot; it is also slightly larger than the NetDisk.

Unlike other products here, the Ximeta devices use a proprietary file-transport technology that requires installing a utility on each PC with access to the drive. You can't add standard hard drives to these Ximeta units, but you can put multiple Ximeta disks on a network, and they will appear as one large drive to the user. You can also attach them directly to a PC via USB 2.0. The principal strike against both products is that they allow only one user at a time to have write access to a drive in its Multi-OS mode; this may be fine in a two-computer household, but it is an unacceptable limitation in most other situations. Multi-Write mode requires all users to have either Windows XP or Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4, and the same version of the Ximeta driver.

Iomega has offerings on both ends of the networked-storage spectrum, the Network Hard Drive and the NAS 100d. The NAS 100d comes in a bigger box than the Network Hard Drive and includes a Wi-Fi access point and two USB 2.0 ports for adding extra hard drives. The relatively inexpensive Network Hard Drive provides two modes of operation: You can attach the device directly to a computer via ethernet or to a network router.