The Netgear SC101 (Storage Central) is a network external hard drive enclosure for up to two IDE hard disk (ATA6 or higher), which connects via an RJ-45 (standard network cable) to the wireless router, wireless modem or switch.

This is an aesthetically very clean, modern looking case, and taking account of two units at home can be very compact.

The hardware configuration is very easy access to the case without screws SC101 (there's a bit 'Catch on the front of the device allows) to be opened in tort. Once you open the case, only the hardware configuration for one or two IDE hard disk (ATA6 or more) of your choice and connect through the available 40-pin IDE and power cable with four pins available. It is therefore simply a case of closing the unit and connect to the AC adapter and router. So far so good!

This is where the trouble starts, the softwareThe installation and its stability. The SC101 software is through the Netgear site (here) are available and includes a SCM software utility for connectivity and disk management and a firmware (Netgear Storage Central Manager) and firmware for the network hard drive enclosure.

While not a failure, that is where questions arise from him. Ideally, if you have a network that does not really want to have the software on each computer you want to access drives to be installed,A simple FTP access would be much easier and user-friendly.

The Storage Central Manager Utility inherantly appeared to us to be defective. When we tried to install our SC101 on a desktop system XP Home, had to install twice without any apparent reason, before the software could be installed "correctly". After the drive can be formatted the system with minimal effort (even if not installed the software update to bring the system causes system to crash), and we wanted to run forA RAID configuration because of the different dimensions of the IDE drive that we had. At this point we still like the SC101, and we thought that maybe it was an isolated problem with the desktop, and we had to do with the initial installation of the software.

Everything that was good for a week, until one day we turned to our desktop, and there were no units from the possible SC101! No number of new installations of SC101 SCM software provides access to units and access to the unit was neverthrough the computer desktop. Luckily, the drives are still accessible through a laptop setup that, with the SCM software and files can be recovered. It seems that the software is used to run the unit very unstable on some systems (the closest we could respond to customer support, with the problem of compatibility with the desktop system was obtained that a conflict with some SCSI drivers used some motherboards, even if an answer, not reallyThe solution to our problem!).

At this point, we decided to cut their losses and decided to show other forms of use in outer SC101 to be too unstable as a backup device, and we could not take the risk.

I fear that in reality do not recommend the Netgear SC101 (Storage Central) to anyone, even taking into account the cost of the units, which is pretty cheap for this type of product, instability in much of the potential for weight saving money.

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