Product Reviews

A little more storage is never a bad thing, but the N299 is just a bit more generous with its features than other NAS boxes. It's obvious as soon as you pull it out of the box - two ethernet ports cater for complex networks, and three USB ports hint at the number of ways to get at your data.

The front USB port is linked to the quick-copy button on the front of the chassis. Plug in a USB flash drive or portable hard disk then press the button, and the contents of the external device are copied to the N299. The rear two ports work with a selection of USB webcams and printers. The webcam option is particularly useful, allowing you to set up a small-scale home security network.

The N299's internal software runs as an HTTP server. The menu system is easy to

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use, and adding users to the drive is simple. There are a few nods to consumers: navigate to the N299's IP address and you're greeted by the option to log in, along with options to run a photo slideshow or stream media.

Dig into the N299's menu system and you'll find the option to use it as an iTunes server, accessible to any PC with iTunes installed. The download manager is another huge plus: HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent files can all be scheduled for download, and the N299 downloads the files without the need for a PC.

We tested the 1TB version, which includes a pair of 500GB Samsung disks, but it's possible to buy the N299 with no hard disks installed for just £92 (£108 inc VAT). Either way, formatting the disks into a RAID array (JBOD, RAID0 and 1 are supported) takes a few minutes, and a firmware upgrade is obligatory - the current firmware version allows only one of its two rear USB ports to be used at a time. This is something we'd expect to be rectified in future versions.

Speed-wise, the N299 is adequate for moving around well-compressed video. On our 1TB version, moving 100MB of medium-sized files to it averages 4.6MB/sec, while DivX video streamed over a wired network runs smoothly.

It is a touch expensive with the disks included, but if you don't mind adding your own, £100 for the chassis alone is a very good deal.