Home > Consumer Reviews > Netgear SC101 Storage Central

Had some problems with an earlier version of the software, but now all is well & happy in SC101-land.

Make sure you use the latest software from the Netgear site.

--
Some points of possible interest:-

Very easy install. I slotted in a pair of 250gb 7200rpm Seagate drives, followed the idiot-proof (worked for me!) instructions and it just worked

Requires a driver on each client but is then like a mapped drive

No Linux driver and sadly no plans according to Netgear (as at 3-3-06)

Really compact

External power supply – this may be a Good or a Bad Thing depending on your needs

Reasonably fast; nothing stunning – shame it’s not gigabit (rumours persist of such a thing in the future)

Very sensitive to power-on sequence (this caused some headaches to start with)

The software has gone through a few iterations but the latest version of the software seems to have fixed my problems

Fairly quiet but it lives in my garage rather than on my desk; the disk whine might be wearing after a while and there looks like no possibility for quiet-mounting the disks

--
This rates four out of five. To get that last star it would need a gigabit connection and a Linux driver.

Bear in mind it’s a Fast Ethernet device and as such is restricted to an absolute maximum of 100 megabits per second. If for example you put loads pictures in just a few directories, and have thumbnails or filmstrip switched on, it will seem awfully sluggish. It’s really good for backup and/or as a media store.

The Netgear SC101 is a nice tidy, compact and aesthetically pleasing device, let down by some problems.

Bad:

1. no 64bit drivers; if your only machine is winXP 64bit then don't bother even trying it - they've said no drivers are available and they have no intention of writing them (I've had to share it from another machine). This is very disappointing from an otherwise reliable company.

2. annoying software, as mentioned by other reviewers; once it's set up it works fine, but if ever ever have to run their manager utility you know it's not going to be fun.

3. the mounted drive letter doesn't survive through a hibernation, and once it's lost the link the only way you can bring it back is a cold boot - the manager utility won't help you here, and will deny that a) there's anything wrong, and b) there's any drive to connect. This one is extremely irritating to me.

4. it seems very slow across a 100MB network; maybe my expectations are too high, but it's not that slow copying between two other machines on my network - that being said, it's set up in mirror mode, and whilst this shouldn't affect things, it could do.

5. I think I'd be happier with a fan inside - it does run hot (though I've had no problems with it yet, heat or otherwise).

Good:

1. it looks good

2. hardware was easy to set up and worked first time (software is not so easy).

3. I serve my music from it - it's been running for about 6 months now without a power cycle.

Conclusion:

I like it, but I'm not sure I'd buy it again; wait for SC102 (or whatever) - maybe they'll fix these problems; there certainly doesn't appear to be any competition to it worth mentioning though.

I bought one a few weeks ago, and I have it working well as my main backup system. I have two 300GB drives installed in it, one acting as a mirror for the other. My main gripe is that the filesystem used on the SC101 is proprietary, so if the SC101 itself fails, any drives you have installed will be unreadable unless you buy another SC101. On the plus side, once you have done a backup, synchronising with any changes you have made is a quick affair using SmartSync - only the changes are copied. Installing the SC101 driver software was a bit of a nightmare however - for a good while the software did not see the drive across my network (a WAG54G 4-port switch), plus I got many installation errors (as another review on the internet warned me). However after a few attempts it installed ok, and updated the software over the internet. Although the manual says to turn on the netdisk before the computer, it does get automatically mounted (in WinXP) within a couple of minutes of turning on the SC101. In general I turn off the drive to save both the planet and the disks, as it gets pretty hot - although that is probably the heat generated by the hard drives themselves.

I intially reviewed this as 'a little slow but otherwise excellent' - the last two days have forced me to delete that review and write this one. I personally apologise to anyone who purchased this thing on the strength of my review - please do yourself a favour and copy your files off this device while you still can. Read on....




I bought this because my data is important to me, so I configured it to mirror the drive, connected it to my network and away we went.

First impressions were that it was slow - very slow, but I can live with that, because my data is safe - how wrong I was.

After a while, it needed a software and firmware upgrade, which caused problems, but Netgear Tech Support sorted it out well.

A few weeks later, disaster struck - the device reported a 'broken mirror' - oh dear I thought - I'll copy my valuable data off the drive just in case.

Too late - many files and folders were corrupted beyond repair, and because the device uses its own filing system, you can't simply remove a drive and connect it to your own computer as it won't see anything.

Last night I spent two-and-a-half hours on the phone with Netgear's Indian Call Centre, who eventually escalated the problem to 'level 2' - level 2 couldn't do anything, and because 'level 3' were off for the weekend, the support staff told me there was nothing they could do, but my data was almost certainly gone forever anyway.

He emailed me a little form, told me to fill it in and wait for them to contact me!

A search on the internet for 'SC101 corrupt files' brought up results that I wish I had seen before I entrusted my data to this device - try a Google search for yourself.

Please avoid this product - former customers call this thing 'The Toaster' for a reason - it toasts your data.

I have now lost valuable data that was being stored securely on mirrored drives on what Netgear call "Easy to share, failsafe storage for home and small business"

This is obviously some new meaning of the word 'failsafe' that I wasn't previously aware of.

Please avoid this product.

Yes, the SC101 is all of these things and the majority of reviews on the web don't seem to favour it. I can understand that. It took me nearly 2 days to configure it, after working out that it needed a range of available dhcp ip addresses from my router; firewalls don't like it and will stop it functioning properly; the lastest version of the sc101 utility doesn't work properly with windows 2000 sp4; its ability to allocate drive letters from windows is hit and miss and worse of all it will sometimes temporarily forget about attached drives - bye bye data; when it does recognise attached drives it can take two minutes before they become visible during which time your pc won't want to do much else. So, why haven't i thrown this in the bin [...]? a) The hardware is solid b)installed drives auto spin down after about 5 mins of inactivity - using the latest firmware c)attached drives appear to windows as local partitions and not network drives - nice d)i trust that negear will get the v.buggy software sorted out soon.

So, it's not great but it is good and it's only the software that lets it down.