Joined on 03/16/05
Cheap and too costly
Pros: Low cost (but not low enough)
Cons: Fails in a relatively short period of time. The drive turns "read-only" with no way to fix/undo/erase.
Overall Review: I have had two PNY Attache2 devices fail (as in, become read-only with no way to undo). The warranty is claimed to be 1 year but you are unlikely able to take advantage of it (you need to have the original packaging and sales receipt) plus, if you happen to have all of that, you have to pay shipping and send back the dead unit (with no way to erase it's contents - it almost seems like a scam by which they have the device fail such that they can collect your private data) I would stay as far away from these devices as possible. Ever $0 would be too much due to the hassle.
Nice but not as good as expected
Pros: 3TB Reasonable performance with FTP Supports many protocols Includes SSH access Apple Network Timemachine Support
Cons: Not very fast Minimal standard configuration options Media indexing into the media folders Timemachine is rather slow CPU underpowered for encrypted connections
Overall Review: While the general execution seems good, there are some annoying bits. FTP performance is very respectable. EXT4 and Linux do a great job of accepting data. However, using mirroring operations will continue to cause problems due to the fact that the media indexing the DLNA server uses writes its metadata into the media folders directly rather than some parallel tree. This means that a strict mirror would delete these index files every time. The media indexing does not have options to constrain the folder path(s) for indexing and thus it spends a lot of time looking over folders that are not interesting. I love that SSH is enabled by default but it was far too insecure. I had to look over the system to configure the SSH server to not accept passwords and only the secure keys that I installed. The CPU is far too underpowered to handle significant traffic that is encrypted (SSL, SFTP, FTP-SSL, or SSH-RSYNC are all significantly constrained in performance, dropping to just around 1MB.s at best, As usual, SMB performance is limited by RTT due to its chatty nature. The minimal CPU and RAM in the device keeps things significantly slower than plain FTP. (Note that encrypted FTP, either SSL or over SSH, also shows significant performance issues due to the CPU limitation) However, for the price the device works well as a separate backup device and is somewhat acceptable as a DLNA server. In fact, if I had more time, I would look at hacking this to trim down some of the overhead and maybe even move out the metadata from the media scans.
Laser works - but packaging is cheap
Pros: The laser works and seems to be relatively bright. I have not yet done a calibration test to see if it really is the power it claims to be.
Cons: The packaging pictured on the product page is not what it comes with. It comes in a plastic zip-lock bag/pouch. It did come with a set a batteries which was nice. I also noticed that the light from the laser dims if you don't hold the button just right. (Cheap button design)
Overall Review: It was not quite what I had expected but it seems like it will do what I need it for.