Product Reviews

The Linksys NAS200 is a network attached storage (NAS) device that allows you to share your files with any computer on your network. You have to add your own SATA hard disks, but it can accommodate two disks and therefore can be configured as a RAID array.

When configured as a RAID 0, both disks are seen by Windows as a single drive, so a pair of 250GB disks would be recognised as one 500GB drive. However, if one disk should fail, all 500GB of data would be lost.

When configured as a RAID 1 array, the contents of one disk are automatically mirrored on the other, so your data should be safe if a disk fails. Only half the total capacity of the two disks would be available, though, so a RAID 1 array of two 250GB disks would have a total usable capacity of 250GB. The NAS200 can also be configured without RAID.

Inserting and removing a hard disk is simple thanks to the well-illustrated setup guide. The NAS200 doesn't use removable disk trays, though, which would make replacing a failed disk even easier. Configuration is also simplified by wizards and the web configuration interface, although note that hard disks have to be reformatted before they

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are recognised.

Unfortunately, the NAS200 was one of the slowest NAS devices we've seen recently. We installed a pair of 250GB Hitachi SATA hard disks. The graph below shows the file transfer speeds for the NAS200 when configured as RAID 0 array. Even though it's limited to 10/100Mbit/s rather than Gigabit Ethernet, the result was disappointing. It was even slower when configured as a RAID 1 array, transferring large files at 3.85MB/s and small files at 0.57MB/s. Copying a large number of files to the NAS200 will be excruciatingly slow.

The poor performance is especially obvious when using the NAS200 as a UPnP media server. Playing a DVD movie stored on the NAS200 using either a PC or network media player was a frustrating experience as the video and audio would often fall out of sync.

We had no trouble sharing the contents of a USB flash drive connected to the NAS200 over our network. Windows file attributes aren't supported, meaning that hidden files will be visible in Windows Explorer, which can clutter the view. Also missing is USB printer sharing, so you can't share a printer with other computers over your network by plugging it into the NAS200.

The straightforward interface for setting up user accounts allows only certain users on your network to access certain files. However, you can't group similar user accounts together for easier administration. There's an FTP server, and this is more configurable: you can change the port number as well as set up guest accounts.

Although the Linksys NAS200 is simple to assemble and configure, it is ultimately frustrating to use due to its poor file transfer performance. Although RAID support is useful in a NAS drive, it's not enough for us to recommend the NAS200.