Netgear SC101 Storage Central

We won't lie, network-attachable storage devices are expensive, no doubt about it. Netgear has come up with an inexpensive NAS (network attached storage) because out of the box, it doesn't have any hard drives in it. This way you can go buy your own hard drives and add them to the box at a much lower price. This definitely makes the Netgear SC101 worth looking at if you're looking for a cheap way to add storage space onto your network.

Getting the Netgear SC101 set up was quite painless. The first step is installing a hard drive, now with this device, you can either have one or two hard drives. Just pop open the SC101's front panel with a quarter and slide the hard drive in sideways into one of the two open bays and connect the IDE cable and power. It's overall pretty simple to figure out if you have opened up a computer before and installed a hard drive or any other component.

Once you get the hard drive(s) installed, just run an Ethernet cable from the back of the SC101 to your router and then install the software included on the CD on any computer that you will want to be able to access the Netgear SC101. The Netgear SC101 is not accessed through an IP address like many NAS boxes, but the software is easy enough to use and guides you nicely through the drive configuration process. The device lets you divide up the storage space, as well as share it among individual users. Different computers on the network can have access to different partitions on
the SC101's hard drive(s). This way you can keep data private, if you wish, for a certain computer's IP address.

After you have set up the optional drive volumes, you will see that the SC101 device shows up in the "My Computer" window just like another hard drive and as a normal drive too, not a network-mapped drive. Right now, the Netgear SC101 is only accessible using Windows XP, 2000, and 2003 Server systems. You can also use the provided software with the SC101 to make backup's of your computer's hard drive and then store it on the SC101.

You will want to buy a top-of-the-line drive with at least 8MB cache so file-transfer speeds are as fast as possible. For casual file transfer and storage, over 100GB should do you just fine, but if you intend on using the SC101 for backup or multimedia storage, you'll probably want more than that.

Pros: Inexpensive, easy to use, ability to create partitions for individual computers
Cons: Windows only and lack of fans can make the SC101 hot
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