In a previous post I was considering Network Storage – well I’ve bitten the bullett and here is the review of it!

The Netgear SC101 is a fantastic piece of kit…. After my initial cock-up ordering a SATA drive instead of an IDE, I now have the toaster (or pig whichever you think it looks more like!!!) installed, up and running!!

Within five minutes of slotting the drive in, I was partitioning the drive from my laptop. You have to install a set of software on every machine you want to be able to access the drives which is a little annoying but I can see why!

The Netgear SC101 will take two hard drives at the same time, and can RAID mirror them. Not something I’ve done initially as I’m just happy to have a second copy off my machine.

I’ve currently configured 200GB of shared space for both our music and photos (feels wierd saying that as I’m normally grumbling I can’t back them up onto a single DVD of 4.7GB but 200GB?!?!) and 100GB of space for the business. If I had a second drive I would debate mirroring just the business section probably (or maybe both with a little pressure applied from Emma!).

I can only see two downsides to this product:

• The need to install software on every machine that needs to access the drives
• Using an obscure format for the drive, so you can’t just move the drive into a machine to read it straight off – that would have been very useful!

All in all a very happy purchase that will be getting an awful lot of use! If you’re interested Amazon are selling the Netgear SC101 here