Got myself a new toy, a Linksys NAS 200, picked it up at on sale at buy.com for $75 and stuffed it with dual 1TB Hitachi 7200RPM hard drives from Newegg.com for $65 a piece after $10 immediate coupon and, where I to get my ass in gear I have a $10 rebate on each that would bring the price down to $55 a pop.

Here is my cliff notes review.

Installation

Physical

A snap, quite literally (do notice I did have a helper throughout so take that into account!).

Take the front covers out by releasing the plastic latch, then squeeze in the 3.5” SATA drives which fit snuggly and perfectly, until you feel the connectors in the back perfectly couple with the drive’s own.

Power up…

Setup

Pop in the Installation CD, which runs the app that scans for the device in your local network.  Either follow the wizard (which I did the first time) or change settings manually (without the wizard).  Settings to set include device network name, IP (static or DHPC) and drive configuration.

The NAS supports as much as you would expect from a $75, 2 drive device.  RAID 0 (stripping) for speed, RAID 1 (mirroring) for peace of mind.  You can also configure it to use the Two separate disks (Recommended)or Two disks configured as one large disk (JBOD/LVM).

I configured it using RAID 1, since I don’t think I have close to that amount of data requiring “secure” storage.  This is the purpose that best fits my immediate needs and that in my mind justified the roughly $150 expense.

One small shortcoming that I think is, again typical to expect of your $75 device, is that you are tied to manage permissions and setup shares and such from the proprietary software interface, something that may fall short of a great experience but also something that I am probably going to do seldom if ever now that it is up and running. 

It is manageable via its self contained and hosted web interface or via a desktop app included with the supporting media.

If you happen to need additional storage to be served via the same mechanism and want to add to the NAS, one option is to do it via it’s USB interface.  The device will manage up to 2 external USB drives and serve them up via the same interface with some limitations, served straight up no RAID.

Some cool, non advertised features include power management (very welcome indeed) and a “Media Server” option which I haven’t tried out yet.

Thus far, not quite 1 month into the purchase, installation, setup and configuration, I would recommend this product to anyone looking for a truly inexpensive way to store and manage (secure if so desired) data.  How expensive or cheap you end up going depends on your options for the actual drives you put in it, but you could start with one and add to it.  Of course that would limit or somewhat restrict your ability to use mirror after the fact.