Product Reviews

Lindy has brought Network Attached Storage to the masses with its latest hard disk enclosure. The Lindy Mini Nas Enclosure holds a standard IDE hard disk and is roughly the size and shape of a Mac mini. The silver-and-white colour scheme is also reminiscent of the unloved baby in the Apple line up. At £64.99, it's very cheap but you have to supply your own disk to go inside the Lindy, so add that to the cost if you don't have a spare disk hanging around. We picked up a 500GB drive for a penny under £90.

Setting up the device is very simple once you've installed your disk - all you have to do is launch the supplied IP finder tool. Copy and paste this into a web browser and you can

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log-on to the drive's admin interface to check settings and set privileges.

The device settings are easy to manage and not bad considering the low cost of the enclosure. You can organise multiple Samba users and what they have access to, including setting passwords for certain folders. The FTP server is clear and easy to maintain with options to allow or block public access and add multiple users with varying directory privileges. You can also manage the IP setting to acquire an address automatically or set it yourself.

We copied our entire iTunes library to the disk and were able to stream songs across the network without any drop-out in audio. Video streamed flawlessly as well. We also ran an overnight back-up to the disk and the Lindy worked well mounting and un-mounting automatically without problem.

Network Attached Storage is a very flexible method of storing all the data that you might want to share. If you run a small business that doesn't want to invest in an expensive server or are a home user that wants a central place for all your music, video and documents then it would be a great solution. We'd have liked a 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet port as opposed to the 10/100Base-T on the Lindy but otherwise it's a perfect device for the small office or home.