Linksys NAS200 Review |

Linksys has traditionally had a very low profile in the desktop NAS market, making the NAS200 its very first and only true appliance. Offered diskless only, it’s a compact little device that can house up to two SATA hard drives of your choice. The base unit is available for less than £100, making it very competitive compared to D-Link’s DNS-323.

When empty, the NAS200 is a featherweight, but it has a nice design and will look great on your desk. Adding hard drives is a breeze as you detach and slide in the back covers to ensure the release ribbon for each hard drive is accessible. No tools are required and you can choose one drive and add another later if you wish. For testing, we installed a pair of 150GB Western Digital Raptor SATA drives, which accepted without issue.

Network connectivity will be the Achilles heel of this appliance as you only get a Fast Ethernet port. As you’ll see in our performance tests, overall file copy speeds are well below those of Gigabit Ethernet devices, making this a poor choice for impatient users. Storage can be further expanded as the two USB ports can be used to add external drives which are automatically released when plugged in. The button on the front is more interesting as it links to the included NTI Shadow backup software and pressing this button launches pre-configured jobs on the PC running the software.

Installation doesn’t take long with the Linksys setup wizard, gently guiding you through every step of the way. Next, switch to the browser interface, which we found easy to use but frustratingly sluggish at times. The status screen provides an overview of the installed drives, total and used storage capacity, and details of all USB drives. With two hard drives in the house, you can opt for spanned, striped, or mirrored RAID arrays, or leave them as two separate drives. Access controls are limited to local usernames and passwords, but you can assign quotas to each to limit available disk space.

The NAS200 is designed for Windows users as it only supports CIFS/SMB protocol but also acts as an FTP server. Shared folders are easy to set up and you can view them all in a list and decide on read and write permissions for each user. Linksys provides a useful shared folder mapping utility that resides in the system tray and also allows you to shut down USB devices for safe removal. Usefully, we found that Windows PnP-X worked fine, so the default public disk share was automatically mapped to our Windows Vista system.

The appliance also provides a download manager feature that allows files to be downloaded in the background via HTTP or FTP. If users are allowed to use this, they can create their own jobs, but only individual files can be selected on the remote system and jobs cannot be scheduled. We had no problems creating jobs that copied files from a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ to the NAS200 via FTP. Multimedia is the order of the day, as the device offers UPnP media services for streaming to suitable media players, but not the ubiquitous iTunes server.

The performance tests confirmed our concerns, as copying a 690 MB video clip from a Boston Supermicro 3.2 GHz Pentium D system with Vista achieved read and write speeds of 3.9 MB/s and 3.8 MB/s resulted. FTP performance was marginally better as the FileZilla utility reported read and write speeds of 5MB/s and 4.5MB/s. We also connected an external USB Maxtor hard drive and copied a 300MB collection of music files onto the device, which was a modest speed of 1.4MB/s. To put those speeds in perspective, D-Link’s DNS-323 returned up to 23 MB/s over Gigabit Ethernet, while QNAP’s TS-209 returned up to 15 MB/s. We also configured the two drives in the NAS200 as a RAID 0 stripe, so the performance for the NAS200 is no better either.

(middle)”The ‘Linksys’ setup wizard makes appliance installation and drive configuration a breeze.”‘(/middle)

We like the NFI Shadow utility as it offers a good range of backup tools and, as the name suggests, can be set up to run permanently in the background, where it saves new files and changes as they occur. Alternatively, you can use it to run scheduled jobs at regular intervals and also specify how many file revisions you want to keep. The backup button on the device worked perfectly, as pressing it started our test job almost immediately. Remember that if NTI Shadow is installed on more than one PC and each instance has multiple backup jobs, this procedure will start everything together. Performance was comparable to Fast Ethernet speeds, with a backup of 1GB of test data returning just 3MB/s.

“‘Verdict”‘

The NAS200 is a nice little NAS device with a reasonable range of features for the price and a smart backup software package. However, it’s really a shame that it only has one Fast Ethernet port, as it severely impacts performance.