Labs

We've seen the FSG-3 before, but with the WLAN version Freecom has packed in more features.

Despite being smaller than most routers, the FSG-3 has three 10/100 Ethernet ports on the rear, plus a WAN port to hook up an Ethernet ADSL modem. It doesn't have quite as many features as the best routers, but sports an SPI firewall, port forwarding, dynamic DNS support (three services) and a DHCP server. On the NAS side, there's an FTP server, a print server, and a web server with PHP, MySQL and SSL support.

With the new 802.11g radio, the FSG-3 makes a wireless router redundant, so if you were planning to buy one as well as a NAS drive, consider this instead. It takes up less space and fewer power sockets than a separate NAS and router. The only disadvantage is that it represents

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a single point of failure, and the return-to-base warranty isn't ideal for businesses.

There are four USB ports: two on the front and two on the rear. To these you can connect USB hard disks, flash memory drives, MP3 players or printers. The lower of the front USB ports has a handy Unplug button, which lets you safely remove disks without going into the menus. On the rear is an eSATA interface - yet another way to add capacity or back up the FSG-3's contents.

The management interface is user-friendly; you can create shares, user accounts and group accounts, as well as giving users quotas. There's still no way to give users read-only access to shares, but you can assign read-only access to the FTP server.

The last new feature is the media-serving capability. It means you can access your music, photos and video on the FSG-3 from anywhere in your home using a wireless media-streaming device.

The FSG-3 is one of the quieter drives, but we did hear the fan spin up to maximum on occasions. Fortunately, seek noises were unobtrusive. Transfer rates were the only real sore point, reading at 5.7MB/sec and writing at 5.2MB/sec over the wired connection. The WLAN interface proved slower than expected from 10m away; we saw about 1MB/sec when reading and writing. Despite this, the Freecom is a superb choice for home users who don't have a router.