Review Sleek aluminium housings are all the rage with hard disk manufacturers, and Freecom’s Network Media Centre is no exception. Available in capacities from 1TB to 2TB, this single-disk Nas box promises to be your ultimate home media server thanks to the inclusion of UPNP/DLNA streaming support, an FTP server, a BitTorrent client and customisable multi-user work areas.
Freecom’s Network Media Centre: aesthetically unexciting
Aesthetically, the Network Media Centre isn’t overly exciting. Instead, it’s pleasantly simple with a smooth brushed-aluminium finish and glossy black faceplate framing a single status LED. Designed to sit horizontally, it’s inherently stable, with a reasonable footprint of 155 x 148mm and a height of only 43mm. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Pogoplug – now in its second incarnation – is the kind of gadgets ‘real’ geeks hate. It’s brightly coloured – an awful white and pink combo; not a plus point – it’s consumer friendly and, when all is said and done, it’s just a network adaptor for hard drives.
Why work a weeny, girly gadget when you can maintain an enormous, manly Nas box?
Cloud Engines’ Pogoplug: not macho
One reason: you don’t want a noise monster blowing hard in the corner of your room. Another is the way Pogoplug makes accessing and sharing connected drives over the internet so easy.
And – geeks, please note – it runs Linux and has already spawned a community of hackers who’ve installed their own distro and apps on top. Read the rest of this entry »
Reviewing the RNDX400E was difficult from start to finish, not least because we were sent the RNDX4210 instead first. It’s an easy mistake to make though, since both the RNDX400 and RNDX4000 (notice the extra zero) series share pretty much identical hardware.
The former (reviewed here) is Netgear’s new ‘Pioneer Edition’ Nas, which is essentially the same as the 4000 series but without hard drives and without Windows Active Directory, snapshot, iSCSI, NIC teaming/failover, SNMP and secure rsync features. Removing all those features make it inappropriate for many business environments, but there are still plenty of areas where the RNDX400E is extremely competent.
Once we had the right Nas in our hands, we were presented with a “corrupt root” message and no access to its configuration pages. Our first check was to see whether the Ram was dislodged, which can happen in transit. This is an easy check as Netgear exposes the Ram just behind the top panel. However, the Ram was fine and it turned out that pre-formatted hard drives were the culprit. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Huawei’s E5 is one of a growing line of compact, standalone HSDPA 3G modems that double-up as impromptu Wi-Fi hotspots. You may have heard of it as 3′s MiFi.
Rather than hook the E5 up to a single device – your laptop, typically – the built-in access point means you can share its 3G link among all your gadgets: phones, tablets and so on. That said, the E5 can also connect directly to a computer and operate as a typical 3G dongle.
Huawei’s E5: no bigger than an old-style 3G dongle, but with a Wi-Fi router on board
Don’t have any other Wi-Fi devices? Then just treat the E5 as a dongle you don’t need to plug in. Or even take out of your bag.
The Wi-Fi support is limited to 802.11b/g, but then most small mobile devices don’t have 802.11n either, so this is perhaps no great loss. The E5′s 3G radio operates in both the 900MHz and 2100MHz UMTS bands, and it has quad-band GSM/GPRS/Edge support too should find yourself too far from a 3G basestation.
When you are in range, the device will support upload speeds to 5.76Mb/s and download speeds of up to 7.2Mb/s. These are theoretical maxima, so you won’t get them in the real world, even if the network you’re using supports them. Read the rest of this entry »
Review There is no shortage of wireless routers that will let you hook up a printer and maybe some USB storage too and make them available to anyone on the network. If your router lacks this ability, there are plenty of gadgets that will add it by bridging USB to an Ethernet port.
The downside of either approach will be instantly apparent to anyone whose router and printer and not close to one another. If the gadgets aren’t adjacent, you end up with long cables or powerline Ethernet adaptors, all of which defeats the object.
Belkin’s Home Base: wireless device sharing over your home network
This is what put us of sharing a printer on the network, even though our router will let us do so. Now, though, we can, thanks to Belkin’s Home Base accessory – a wireless printer sharing device.
Home Base is a small box with four USB 2.0 ports round the back, though it can handle up to 15 devices, connected through hubs. It has an Ethernet port if you do want wires, but crucially there’s an 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi adaptor inside that will talk to your router from any point in your premises that’s capable of getting a decent signal. Read the rest of this entry »
