Pros: price

Cons: I cannot access file information on the mirrored Seagate NAS drives which I purchased same time from NewEgg. Files became corrupt and constantly out of service. Trying to get them returned so I can move on with a reliable unit.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Asm R.,

File corruption does not necessarily indicate that the NAS drive is defective. Please try installing the drives on a Desktop PC and try running our SeaTools diagnostics to determine the overall drive health:

http://goo.gl/R9KKh4

Please let us know the result and contact us directly so we may assist further:

http://www.seagate.com/contacts/

Best Regards,
Seagate Support

Pros: Shell Shocker price!... Read and Write speeds good enough at 80-100 MBps. Remote access with either Sdrive, SSH, or browser via the native file browser app. Easy setup. Nice web interface. WOL is supported and works great. Just wanted to create a large share to dump old backups on and this cheap little NAS fit the bill. Not a bad performer at all !

Cons: Disappointed with power saving features - the minimum time to put the drives into standby is 20 minutes, but shortly after the drives spin down they spin right back up again with absolutely no activity from any of the computers on the network. The WOL support is great but it takes the unit a full 3 minutes to wake up from the "deep sleep mode" feature. Booting up doesn't even take that long. Minus one egg.... Needs a firmware fix big time in my opinion.

Other Thoughts: After reviewing Seagate's compatible drive list one could draw the conclusion that only Seagate NAS drives work with this unit. Not true - I'm using two 4tb Toshiba drives (Item #: N82E16822149569) that I also purchased on a Shell Shocker deal, configured as a Raid1, without any problems whatsoever.

Pros: Speed as advertised - over 80 MB/s. Easy to use NAS OS. Bought it under shell shocker deal so value is excellent.

Cons: This is the third NAS under $100 I bought. All three has very slow response in processing. Boot-up times are long for all three, like 5-10 minutes.

Other Thoughts: I bought this when it was on sale. The price I paid was Iess than what I paid for Seagate Business Storage 2 Bay. I was pretty satisfied with that unit after 3 years of service (24-7.) However, STCT100, in my opinion, is actually better than Business Storage. Speed is over 80 MB/s vs 45 MB/s for the older unit. The software is more nimble and smoother to navigate, even though processing speed, such as in booting, building RAID, or changing a share name, like the other NAS I owned is slow.

I did not find much compatibility problem, I used two 5 year old Hitachi HDD (2 TB and 1 TB) with no problem at all. Currently I swapped the 1 TB with a two year old Western Digital (2TB) HDD and I could build a RAID 0 volume on them with no problem at all.

Pros: It didn't cost much (Shell Shocker). It's quiet, and doesn't use much power.

Cons: I haven't been able to get it to work. It stinks. See "Other Thoughts."

Other Thoughts: I regret buying one of these when it was a Shell Shocker recently. I thought it would save me some time setting up something I could use as scratch storage on my network, which presents some challenges because it has a variety of devices (Windows of mulitple flavors, Linux, Mac, Android & Unix) attached; the marketing materials for this box suggested it could play nice with them all. It did not. Instead I spent way too much time trying to get it set up with even basic functionality (as of this writing I still have not succeeded).

The documentation I was able to find on the Web might suit someone in kindergarten, with lots of nicely drawn pictures, but is pretty content-free. About all that comes in the box is a "Quick Start Guide."

And the disk carriers smell bad. Literally.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Charles,

If your Seagate NAS has not been detected, please use the following troubleshooter to assist:

http://goo.gl/SQWqeS

For additional support for your Seagate NAS, including the complete software and hardware user guides, helpful tutorials, and other essential drive information, please reference the following link below:

http://goo.gl/Q23aAB

If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact our support staff by phone and we will be happy to assist further:

http://www.seagate.com/contacts/contact-numbers/

Best Regards,
Seagate Support

Pros: Reliable and comparably quick performance. Intuitive management interface with decent file permissions.

Cons: Touted ability to run "apps" but has a limited apps repository.

Pros: easy to set up, recognized by computers running different operating systems, steady peformer

Cons: none so far

Other Thoughts: Had a couple of hicciups setting up, owing to my own lack of knowledge up how network drives are recognized. Tech support at Seagate was patient and helpful, haven't had to contact them since. Not noticing any particular lag when opening/closing files. Have not tried using this for streaming content.

Pros: if you have the nas set to mirror and you have two 1TB drives in it, then you lose 1/2 of the total space. I wouldn't stripe them. also, due to formatting you tend to lose 15% to overhead.

Cons: if this were a four bay(which it isn't and that's not the point) I'd advise raid 5.

Pros: Easy setup, Works fine

Cons: Unit lost 1 TB of storage space, contacted Seagate, could not figure out problem, returning unit.

Other Thoughts: Wish they would fix this problem sooner than later.

Pros: The NAS is quiet, simple to use and setup. I get WRITE transfer rates 60-70MB/s over my wired LAN. My Sony blu-ray picked up the DLNA once I enabled the feature on the NAS immediately. Used with a 3TB seagate desktop hdd with no problems.

Cons: It does take a couple minutes to start from a cold boot. Nothing to do with the NAS but congested Wifi will kill your file transfer speeds.

Pros: Easy setup, poorly designed software but still easy. Very quiet running NAS even after adding two 4TB Seagate NAS 7200RMP HDD's.

(I knocked off an egg due to the poorly designed software)

Cons: Setup defaults to the Seagate "SimplyRAID" of which you cannot change, therefore, you've got to set up the unit as SimplyRAID & then change it over to JBOD, RAID 0 or RAID 1 once completed. Pay attention as you don't want to copy all your data to the NAS before it's configured the way you want it!

Other Thoughts: This is a pretty nice dual bay NAS unit & with two Seagate 4TB 7200 RPM HDD's the unit runs very quietly. I purchased the NAS for $99.99 which is a fair price, the MSRP of $169.99 is WAY over priced!
The real expense is, and should be, the cost of the HDD's, my suggestion is don't purchase cheap desktop SATA HDD's if you want your NAS to perform!
On my home LAN this NAS is a faster backup solution than my previous backup method of USB 2.0 attached external HDD's, which did surprise me!