Netgear Stora

Netgear Stora 1TB Home Media Server - 2 Bay Network Attached Storage ( 1 X 1TB drive included )

I was looking for a solution which would help me store files on my network then access them from multiple locations around the house.

I found the Netgear Stora 1TB Home Media Server, the reviews were all positive so I thought that's the thing I been look for and ordered it.

Pros

If you are looking for something to back up your media and documents and share with your other devices such as Xbox 360, PS3 then this can work well. It's simple to set up and you will be able to access your files over the Internet - you could use this feature to share photos with your family or use your files if you for example need to access them from a work location or when you are away from home.

• The unit is silent
• Easy to set up
• Easy to add a second drive for mirroring
• Simple to back up files
• If you needed to restore your data on a computer would put everything back where it had picked it up from
• 3 year warranty

For the average PC / Mac user this product works well.

Cons

My list of cons is only specific to people who are more of a power user rather than somebody who like my mum uses her computer for comms and photos.

The hard drive is formatted using the XFS which means should the device fail you can't simply drop the hard drive in to your computer and carry on using it. In the past I have had an external hard drive casing die on me but luckily the file system on the drive was NTFS so it didn't matter. The Stora does come with a 3 year warranty though so should it fail then you can probably get it fixed but I do not know how long the turn around on repairs with Netgear is.

File Structure
The Stora comes pre formatted with a file structure, there are 3 locations, My computers, Family library, My Library. These can not be changed which was something that didn't work for me. *see backing up

Backing Up
The stora back up software backs up your files to specific paths - these can not be changed. For the average user this wouldn't be a problem. For example if you want to back up my pictures in your user folder. It will recreate the full path putting it in MY COMPUTERS on the stora C:\Users\xxxxxxx\Pictures. For me this isn't want I want to do. I want to back them up on the root in a folder called Photos and then make this folder shareable between my computers / devices, then in this folder I want to split the photo back ups from each computer on my network to users.

Another problem which I didn't find a work around unless you create a auto exec file was when you restart your computer you don't auto login to the stora - which means it isn't available in my computer. So using my current software which I used to back up my system I couldn't trust to work right.

Remote Access
If you create a user account and set up the stora for remote access then you can access your storage device by going to user.mystora.com and logging in with a user name and password. I didn't feel this was safe - it could be safer if you were using a password created using uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols - but how could you remember this when you were out being the point of remote access. I felt that possibly with a password buster it could be possible to get in to your files. So I didn't feel I wanted to back up anything that was private - for example photos of my children or login information to web servers. I am slightly paranoid about the fact that my login information would be stored on the mystora website and in a database.

Overall the Netgear Stora is the perfect solution for somebody who doesn't have much computer knowledge and is looking for a very simple solution it is fool proof.

For now I shall continue to use a 3 drive system where I take files from my system disk and back up on to an internal drive and mirror that to an external drive. This way safeguards if my internal's fail I have the external and vice versa.