Pros: Attractive, grey brushed aluminum case - good inicators and controls layout. Fanless design is very quiet but results in warm enclosure. Lots of features (can act as USB host to copy from thumb drive/cards with no PC, print server, audible indication of readiness, capacity can be increased via eSata/USB ports and another drive, RAID, FTP server, UPNP media server etc etc). Up and running quickly although I did not use install wizard software - not much more complex than setting up most wireless routers.

Cons: Embedded OS/firmware needs a lot of work. Changed admin password and was immediately locked out of device - it appears that special characters (in my case a '$' (dollar) sign) are not correctly interpreted and result in a password other than the one you intended. Device has a reset button on the back to set back to default password. This reset ability can be disabled through the admin interface though and I would caution against removing the ability to do a reset. After a few tries I figured out that the '$' character was causing the issue and stuck with letters and numbers. I also found that there were multiple instances within the first few days where I could not delete directories from the drive either through the device's web interface or through Windows Explorer. No error message - everything appeared to succeed but directories remained. This appears related to depth of nested directories so you can get around it by 'pruning' from the bottom up.

Overall Review: eSata performance using the interface on the back of the device was VERY slow. With 2 identical WD 500 GB drives, copying 1.2 GB from the QNAP to the attached SATA device took 8 minutes. Didn't test RAID performance but doesn't bode well. Make sure you go to the QNAP site and read the list of pending bugs for the current firmware revision. Gigabit ethernet performance was poor even with jumbo frames enabled - barely 100 mbits /sec. Typical transfers on the same network segment with other gigabit devices average 600-700 megabits/sec.