It’s been over a year, but Freecom has finally added wireless capabilities to its neat little desktop NAS appliance, the FSG-3 Storage Gateway. We first looked at the Storage Gateway in 2005 and were very impressed with the range of features on offer. The wireless model offers essentially the same features, but now includes an 802.11g wireless access point.
The gateway uses a standard ATA drive with four models available ranging from 160GB to 500GB. It offers shared network storage via CIFS/SMB or FTP, so Linux or Macintosh systems must access it via one of those protocols as it doesn’t support NFS or AFP. Four USB 2.0 ports are available and can be used to connect other external storage devices or printers for sharing. Unfortunately, Gigabit Ethernet isn’t on the menu, as the gateway still only offers four switched Fast Ethernet ports, one of which is dedicated to WAN tasks.
Internet access can be provided to all users simply by connecting an ADSL or cable modem, and the gateway offers firewall protection. Four connection modes are available, supporting PPPoE and PPTP along with dynamic and fixed IP addresses. Using dynamic addressing, we plugged in a simple intelligent ActionTec ADSL modem and had internet access in seconds. In addition to the USB variant, the gateway also offers an eSATA connection for connecting external hard drives via a high-speed connection with 3 Gbit/s.
When we looked at the default gateway, eSATA devices were very few and far between, but things have improved since then. Freecom offers its own Hard Drive Pro models with eSATA interfaces, and Seagate also has a range of external drives. The gateway must be powered off before adding an eSATA drive, which must also be preformatted as FAT32 if you want read and write access. A great idea, but if you’re sharing an eSATA drive over the network, any speed benefits are lost as the Fast Ethernet switch just chokes off its performance potential. In fact, Seagate’s drives are primarily aimed at connecting directly to a PC, as they come with a PCI eSATA card (see our Seagate eSATA drive review).
Installing the appliance doesn’t take long, as the included FSG wizard finds the gateway on the network for you. The web management interface has been redesigned and, while still somewhat basic, offers easy access to all features. Shared folders are easy to set up and security options have been improved as you can create users and groups and set whether they have read-only or read/write access. Storage usage can be controlled by assigning quotas in MB or GB to selected users.
Performance over CIFS has improved over its predecessor with a 690MB video file written to the gateway from a Supermicro 3.2GHz Pentium D system on the LAN in 130 seconds at an average of 5.3MB/s , not improved. As expected, read performance was slightly better when copying the file from the gateway at a speed of 6.5 MB/s. These speeds are roughly equivalent to most single-drive desktop NAS devices using Fast Ethernet ports. Wireless file copy performance was uninspiring when the same test file was copied from a Fujitsu Siemens LifeBook equipped with a Proxim 802.11g wireless PC card in 356 seconds at an average of 15.5 Mbps.
A big bonus of the Gateway is the sheer variety of features to play with. It offers an email server that allows you to set up your own internal email addresses without the need for an ISP. The FetchMail utility can be used to fetch email from an external server and assign it to selected local accounts on the gateway. The main point to note is that the appliance uses DDNS and as noted in the manual you may find that many mail servers consider email from these types of addresses as spam. You don’t get much help setting it up, but the appliance uses the TwonkyVision MediaServer v3.1 to distribute multimedia content to UPnP devices.
The bundled Acronis True Image software allows you to back up disk images to the appliance, although this is the OEM version that only allows imaging and restoring entire disks. For around £20 you can upgrade to the full version, which adds features like scheduled and incremental backups. The appliance runs MySQL so it can manage a database, while the Apache web server can serve your own web pages to the internet over HTTPS. The same applies to FTP services, while port forwarding can be used to open access from the Internet to specific PCs. Wireless security extends to WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption, and an access control list uses client MAC addresses to block or allow access to specific systems.
“‘Verdict”‘
A compact NAS device that offers a full range of features at a reasonable price. Performance is on par with similar devices in this price range and security has been improved over the previous model, although documentation could be a little more helpful for many services.
Quotas can be applied to local user accounts to control storage usage.
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Security has been improved to allow the application of read and read/write permissions.
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The appliance had no problems identifying USB storage devices and printers during the test.
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With the integrated mail server, you can retrieve emails from an external server and forward them to gateway user accounts.
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Noise levels are unremarkable, but don’t go for “hot and quiet” if you value your hard drive.
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