Review The quest for faster home networks continues, and with 802.11n Wi-Fi failing to deliver promised 300-450Mb/s peak speeds to a lot of people – blame sneaky manufacturers slipping cheap, single-antenna, 72Mb/s adaptors into their devices – some punters, even those without wireless blackspots in their homes, are looking to technologies like powerline networking.
Netgear’s XAV5001: the centre light changes colour to reflect the link strength
A year or so back, Belkin introduced its Gigabit powerline Ethernet adaptor, but it was the only mainstream brand to deliver products based on proprietary technology from Gigle, now owned by network chip giant Broadcom. 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 The EVA9150 is the latest addition to Netgear’s Digital Entertainer family of media streamers and it picks up pretty much where its predecessor – the EVA8000 – left off. The main draw of the EVA8000 – providing you were running latest beta firmware version and not the shipping release – was its ability to chew through almost any file format you chose to throw at it and spit out decent quality video.
Netgear’s EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite
The EVA9150 uses the EVA8000 firmware as its starting point, and then adds extra features, so you get the same level of file support plus some new additions to boot. The hardware has also been given an overhaul, most notably with the addition of an internal 500GB SATA hard drive and support for 802.11n Wi-Fi.
The case has also been tidied up slightly, so it now looks more at home sat among other consumers AV kit than the wide, thin EVA8000 ever did. The Wi-Fi antennae are now built in instead of protruding vertically from the rear of the unit, which obviously makes for a neater look. Still, this could present reception issues if the EVA9150 is sat at the bottom of a stack of other devices. Read the rest of this entry »
