Home > Consumer Reviews > 120GB Etherfast Nas/print/ftpserver 1 Open Bay for Addl HD

I have had my EFG-120 for about 5 months. I have bought the unit used. The unit sometimes looses connection with the network and needs to be reset. I have never had the FTP feature going because i dont use FTP. Over all i love the unit. I think alot of people keep playing with them and they go screwy.. Set it , leave it alone, and access the drives...

I was lured to this product through an ad-slick stuffed in with my LinkSys network card packaging. In retrospect it was really too good to be true - a NAS for under $700, with group rights assignment, built in backup, print server and gigabit network card! I started thinking about all the old small office servers I could retire using this device. "Huge Mistake!" Why, oh why did I not research this product before I invested in it? Just the reviews here would have alerted me to the imminent falibility of the EFG120. With 5 EFGs deployed to various locations finally the hammer fell. The largest of the 5 locations using the EFG120, (that recently replaced their aging Novell server) called to say that the device was no longer responding. I tried a VPN connection session with the EFGs web interface and got the interface up. Drive1 status reported "Not Formatted", and Drive2 status reported "120GB 100%Free". What?! To make a long and very sad story short; the "backup" system had never made a copy of disk1 to disk2. Drive1 lost the shares and users configuration and even restoring the configuration from the .bin file I made did not give us access to the files which are locked away in the Linux file system. LinkSys tech support immediately directed me to contact Maxtor (the drive maker) to retreive the data and said I should call back. I refused to be passed on and forced the poor Indian guy to work with me. He clearly knew very little about the device and had to put me on hold several times to answer basic configuration questions I had. I'm having a PC shop that has a linux box try to recover my data. If I'm lucky and the data can be retrieved rest assured that it will NOT be going back on the EFG120 (should be re-christened the POS120). If your data is even mildly important select some other device to host it, ANY other device - a thumb drive, an old '95 box, ANYHTING but the EFG120. This was a great idea but poorly, poorly executed. The online, phone and printed support is woefully scant. If it were possible I would give this product - (negative)-5 trillion stars.

This is a piece of garbage. It stopped reading the harddrive about 14 months into usage. Cisco support is based in India, they bounce you around like a hot potato and then after 1 hour tell you that it is out of warranty. It has turned me off to Cisco and Linksys products completely. I used to be 100% Linksys -- not anymore.

BTW, I finally did get some support out of Linksys, but it was not easy and definitely not worth the hassle.

I am the not-so-proud owner of this model as well as a couple of its previous incarnations. Of the 4 I've had in my possession, 3 have died without explanation, and without any kind of manufacturer support beyond "ship it back and we'll replace it for you". I don't know that I should expect any more than that given the nature of the device, but it is indeed frustrating for that to be every problem's answer.

Additionally, the Linksys tech I first talked to after it failed told me that my data was simply "gone" beyond any ability to recover it. I asked to be moved up to the next support level. The new tech support person told me that the data wasn't gone, but he couldn't find out what filesystem the disk used when asked.

(XFS, for those who find themselves in need of that information. `mount -t xfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt/`. The data is in the directory of the same name). If the filesystem is ok, this should allow you to get your data back.

Had major issues with this due to file locking settings (oplocks)
This unit will not work with FoxPro programs and multiple users properly, and Linksys does not give access to be able to change the oplocks configuration.