SYBA SD-U2NAS-35 Aluminum 3.5" Silver USB 2.0 & RJ45 External Enclosure w/Big fan

Pros: The perfect companion for those old IDE hard drives. Bought this as a gift for someone with a 500GB drive laying around. Quick & easy to set up. IDE NAS enclosures are hard to come by, especially for this price.

Cons: Can use only FAT when functioning as a NAS

Other Thoughts: Able to get rid of an old PC that was being used as a fileserver - great alternative!

Pros: Allows storage. NAS is a nice idea, but I'm not sure the technology is mature enough, or the drivers are bug free.
Setting up on your network is pretty painless, plug it in and you should be able to see it under connected devices. I would recommend a static ip address and not letting the dhcp of the router determine it. Every time you restart the device, the router seems to re-assign the address, which will hose your connections, and drive your users(or family) nuts.

Cons: 1. Setup is somewhat challenging. I stripped one of the screw receptors trying to open the end to put the hdd into the box. No need to use a torque wrench at the factory, guys. Also, sliding in the drive is a bit tricky; I was being careful and the rails were getting stuck. Found just shoving it works better.
2. Frequent errors from Konqueror trying to transfer files; for the time being I'll attribute this to Konqueror.
3. Slight issues with permissions trying to access files, but may be more network related.
4. The internals of the drive are IDE, so the largest drive I found was 500Mb; small by today's standards.

Other Thoughts: I run Linux at home. Either the firmware of the drive of my version of Linux(Suse 10.2) has occasional issues with large writes of data. I've been receiving a Konqueror exceptions on occasion, and found that disconnecting from the drive and re-connecting is the only solution.

Pros: Good price Small size

Cons: Did not work at all. Got RMA, has been over two weeks and still have no merchandise, Newegg will not send new until they have the old one back in their hands. Newegg has my money, UPS has my merchandise, I HAVE NOTHING.

Other Thoughts: Will see how replacement works if and when I get it. Will update review then. Who knows, it MAY be good!

Pros: This is a great way to utilize your old IDE drives that you have lying around! I've got my SYBA connected to my home network as an FTP storage device.

The built-in firmware was mostly easy to work with. A little confusing at times. Not the best, but not horrible. Been up and running for two months 24/7, and still going strong.

It's nice to have a home network drive! Makes a decent backup drive. Easy way to securely share stuff between machines.

Cons: Wasn't able to get USB connection to work with Vista. Not too big a deal since I mainly wanted for network access.

The bigger deal is the fact that this enclosure only reads/writes FAT32 (NOT COMPATIBLE WITH NTFS!) This came into affect when I wanted to access some old info on a drive I had that was formatted in NTFS (my desktop crashed, and only had my laptop accessible at the time). If you have an NTFS drive, the firmware can re-format it into FAT32. I don't understand why they didn't set it up to recognize both format types, but this is slightly annoying if you just want to make old drives accessible.

Other Thoughts: With a little port forwarding in my router, I have this encloser set up secure access to this device anywhere in the world! Very nice! For someone who has never set up a home network storage device like this, the SYBA is a great experimental device to work with!

Pros: Cheap NAS. Does what its supposed to do and as advertised. Good for what it will be used for. USB+LAN capability. Hard drive power management/scandisk utilities. FAT32 so you can use it as a USB or NAS without reformatting, altho NTFS or EXT2-3 would've been nice to have as a choice. USB speeds are about average to other USB hard disks, LAN, however is a different story, but not gosh-awful for 10/100.

Cons: Kinda slow. Sustains anywhere between 3-4MB/s but I was expecting that. Not hard to do but was a pain to assemble, you have to mount the NAS PCB onto the bottom of the hard drive, then slide it into place within the NAS enclosure, won't be easy to swap hard drives if needed. Doesn't play nice with Vista but still works and doesn't handle more than one thing at a time easily. Copying files to this unit and simply logging in to view the Status page in the GUI locked it up a couple of times, forcing a hard reset (powercycle) and I was suprised I didn't lose any of the data already copied to it. For what it will be used for, these Cons are simply knit-picks to me. Hard-core movie downloaders, storage hogs and data hermits beware! This may not be for you!

Other Thoughts: Its quirky but over all I like it and would recommend it to anyone needing a simple backup solution. I think its worth the $39.99 but not the $51.22 after shipping.

Pros: umm... worked for 6 months

Cons: the NIC died on this thing, and it was only powered on when used... so I'd say with continuous use it'd make it about a month... wish I could give this thing 0 eggs.

Other Thoughts: don't waste your money, the site doesn't even have an RMA form to fill out, mostly dead links, but for $40 that's par for the course

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Customer,

Please try to reset the device to default settings. If the Ethernet connection is still not working, please contact us for replacement. All of our products come with at least 3 years warranty. Please don't hesitate to contact us at support-us@syba.com if you have any problem or question.

Regards,
Syba Customer Service

Pros: This unit works as advertised. Using USB cables you can create and access NTFS and FAT32. Network mode only FAT32 is allowed. Is it releatively quiet, tolarable low fan hum in a silent room.

Cons: Does not support drive partitioning. Fan doesnt stop even when not in use for hours. Although this is not really bad thing, I would prefer a truely quiet enviorment when not in use (overnight). Network transfer is slow but sufficent for my needs. Support link on website is poor.

Other Thoughts: Overall, I can't complain. The unit does as advertised. Firmware was already updated to the latest when i recieved the unit, I checked to be sure.

Pros: it has built in Samba share, FTP, Windows Client, easy to configure, my old Xbox running XBMC can see it every time, HDD spin down, pretty quiet and active cooling. For $40 you can't ask for much more, its cheap and now I've got 320BG of NAS. It's not perfect, but it'll suffice till I can build a 4-5 HDD NAS box on my own using FreeNAS or Linux.

Cons: Takes only FAT32 formatted drives, so you have to know how to format large drives, there are scripts out there so don't panic, just know you'll have to format your NTFS drive to use the network connection. It will see the NTFS drive when using USB. Also, you can only do one or the other, no USB transfers while connected to your network.

Other Thoughts: I'll post again if I have problems, but I really can't complain, I was initially looking for just a USB enclosure for an IDE HDD, and got a network capable HDD instead.

Pros: I am sure this is an excellent product, and I am lothe to ding it due to its interface, but...

Cons: It takes IDE drives! As in, *parallel ATA*, not serial ATA.

One more time? Sure.

PARALLEL ATA, NOT SERIAL ATA.

YOU CANNOT USE A MODERN DRIVE WITH THIS ENCLOSURE.

Pros: Works. Easy Web based setup. Password protectable files switching between usb and network does not cause it problems. Power save feature of spinning down harddrive after a set time (wakeup from sleep is only 5s-10s with now hickups). Great price.

Cons: 3MBps transfer speed on a 100MBps network (3x slower than to my computer to computer transfer of ~10MBps (close to max). Very slow when copying file within the drive itself (took 10 minutes to copy a 600MB file, for an ata133 harddrive that is really slow. It should only take 30s-60s.). That includes Moving files between separate shared folders. Only supports FAT32 (it did not like multiple partitions on the drive with one being a NTFS).

Other Thoughts: The speed is fine for playing music and video without a problem. For large file transfers, however, it would take quite a while. I am still debating about send it back, purely from the speed issue, but I have not found any other 100MBps NAS that had good reviews and 1GBps NAS are still in >$150 range (this was only $49 after shipping). Your choice.