Why give a NAS to somebody who clearly has no idea what RAID 0 is. Tom's is loosing its air of authority with every word she types.

25c per GB (36c in RAID 0; I think author inverted the math?) is really pretty good for storage. If the included drives are the RAID-ready WD1000FYPS drives ($210 ea on newegg, OEM), then the cost of the empty system is only $159. So for $159 you get all of the rest of the system you need for a file server with pretty large storage capacity.

I think this device is very well suited for a media-file-server role for a home network. You don't need high write speed for that, and the read speed looks to be more than adequate for 2 or 3 streams of HD Video. If you try to put this much storage under a TV in an HTPC case, you begin to face heat and noise issues.

(sorry - meant 36c per GB in RAID 5)

Question for Rachel: What model drives are in this thing? Are they the RE2 versions, or just the Caviar Green? The latter cost only $130 ea, which would make the value of this product much less appealing.

Nevermind. These use EACS drives, not FYPS. No longer an interesting product; I don't need to pay $480 for the empty shell with RAID 5 capabilities.

Thanks for your comment, Gyrodec2. Please offer a better definition for RAID 0 than the one I used, and I will consider changing the article.

All the best,

Rachel Rosmarin, Editor, Tom's Guide

gryodec2, +1!

"I had to dig deep to re-share the ShareSpace’s public folder on a computer after the original mapping had been messed up."

Pretty sure that's in lesson 2 of "Basic Networking for Idiots"

"Or, Raid 0 (little failure protection, but incorporates striping)"

Pretty sure that's NO PROTECTION not "oh just a little bit"

"and if something goes wrong, everything might be affected—scary"

Assuming it's JBOD, you only loose what's on the failed disk, less scary than RAID0.

"Forget about it if you don’t have Windows Server experience"

Or, ya know, maybe a little more accurately, if you don't have an actual AD environment. In which case you would be completely mental to use something like this.

This is probably the single worst review I've ever seen on Toms.

BTW, windows has a built in FTP client, it's called Internet Explorer. DOH!

What's the point of testing a NAS device without testing its power consumption, particularly its idle power, but also its power under load? How is its response time if it's in a low power state? Does it even have a low power state?

These things are plugged in and on all the time. The true price of ownership has to take into account the number of kilowatt hours per year you're going to use to run it.

Michaelahess,

Thanks for your comment. Most of your criticisms here seem to focus on your opinion that networking knowledge SHOULD be required to use a product like the one in this review. I disagree. Western Digital is marketing this product to people with No Experience of this kind. My review aimed to point out that a person without this experience and knowledge might struggle with certain tasks. For instance, drive mapping is not a skill most basic PC users have ever learned. This product aims to make the drive mapping function easy, but did not work on a second attempt, meaning someone had to know how to map manually. And, why would a HOME USER have an Active Directory environment? Perhaps you should reserve your criticisms for WD's marketing department?

Rachel Rosmarin, Editor of Tom's Guide

Luke D,

This is an excellent idea. I will look into power consumption tests to see if they are feasible for our Tom's Guide test lab.

All the best,
Rachel Rosmarin, Editor of Tom's Guide

Your AD comment implied that knowing how to use windows server would reap the benifits of using the AD integration, it was misleading, partly due to WD's marketing, partly due to your wording.

I disagree with your comment about sharing a drive. I've been to numerous households with more than one computer and I can't begin to count the number of average home users that are able to create shares between machines. I have been shocked many times when someone says "why can't my {son, brother, mom} copy files to the share I created." Anyone buying a device like this is fairly likely to have more than one computer, and almost certainly know how to map a drive or access a UNC share, even if they don't know what it means.

I think this article could have been better with simple changes on wording, mostly in the RAID info you provided.

I have an '08 AD environment for my personal home use.....Thought all IT people had that.

Thanks. I appreciate your feedback.

All IT people may have an '08 AD environment at home, but this site (Tom's Guide), and especially this product, are not designed for IT people.

Sorry, I'm old school Toms, where it's all for advanced users/gamers/IT. Still not used to you guys pushing for the more consumer oriented market.

What kills me though is all these "simple" articles that just have misleading facts, not enough depth, or bias, Toms was never like that until a year or two ago.

Done ranting, thanks for listening!

That's because back before 2 years ago Tom's was still Tom's... now it's a corporate entity with too many cooks spoiling the broth. Tom's sold out for cash, and the overall quality of the majority of the reviews has gone down the tubes. At least Ben and Rob still are around to not suck.

You mean they're still around to suck right?

I liked your review and it by itself ruled out this device for a home network based on cost & cold reboot. However, I do agree power consumption and a better breakdown on which drives WD had installed would have improved the article. If WD had used the WD1000FYPS drives, then the $999 cost would have been a good deal instead of being a rip off. Heck, for $999 I could build a 4TB Windows Home Server. Have you or Tom's consider comparing WHS to the higher priced NAS? {Yes, I do know the NAS & WHS address different needs, but I do wonder if Microsoft has better idea about home network needs. Folks, it is ok to flame, but not everything Microsoft does is a kludge.}

+1 here, I'm worse then old school .. I'm old-fart school. I begain reading THG back when Tom did a full write up on how to overclock a 486 DX-2 66 to be a DX-2 80Mhz ... yes folks .. back in the day when win95 wasn't even a pipe dream and PnP wasn't even invented yet.

But I agree with the above reader, the articles I have grown to respect and trust have recently over the years gone from a reliable informative source for us "geeks" to people like my parents. Heck .. my own father has read some scruff on here and gives me a dumb look. How sad is that.

Either way, no matter what I think of the content THG offer (or rather lack thereof), as a major publisher of online content, news and reviews you should at least take the responsibility of knowing the difference between JBOD and RAID0 when giving a review of a devices that this is a major feature of. It's basically as silly as a guy who doesn't have a drivers licence and has never driven a car giving a review of a new Porche ... how much credit would you give that reviewer? Maybe as much credit as I give you ...maybe more becuase at least he has an excuse ... you have google or even pick up a good IT book. I know it's harsh .. but downplaying reviews for the soccer mom's and 12 year olds (should they not stay in Disney chat lines anyways) out there is one thing, but outright mis-information is not tolerable.

RAID0 offers no data protection at all. NONE! ZIP!, ZILTCH! Anyone who knows the difference between a mouse and a modem knows that. JBOD is exactly that Just a Bunch of Disks again with no redundancy but if one drive goes south .. you only loose that drive, not the entire array. Your review should actually simply recomend to people to stay away from RAID0 as it's simply not worth it .. your failure rate would be 4x higher (1/4th the time the MTBF of a single drive). that 5 or 10 year MTFB doesn't look so great running RAID0 when it goes down by 3/4 ... 10 years goes down to 2.5 years and that is just a rough number from teh manufacture .. in reality you will want to half that again in any real life situation. So Running RAID0 with 4 drives which have a MTFB of 10 years should realistically be looked apon as having a failure withing 1.25 years .. hell .. even stick with the 2.5 years.

Hi Johnny, and all other commenters hung up on my use of the words "little protection" rather than "zero protection" when describing the definition of Raid 0: I'll change the words to say zero protection. However, I think we can all agree that at the hardware level, all drives have some amount of failsafe protection built in. That, simply, was my meaning, but I agree I could have been more clear.

Now, I would also like to take the time to remind all you how much we appreciate you coming to the site and reading our reviews. However, Tom's Guide is an entirely different site from Tom's Hardware. Tom's Hardware strives to continue as that "old school" site you remember from years past. But Tom's Guide aims to appeal to a different, far less technical, type of person. I hope that you all can make the distinction, but please feel free to visit both sites if you see a story that interests you!

All the best,
Rachel

Any way you could test NFS performance (preferably on a Mac and Linux box)?

Reading this article, is like I'm reading as boffin mag for retailers, not sure of your technical knowledge Rachael, though after reading this article it comes across as a complete idiot has written this article recycling the same junk that comes out sales rep's mouth..


After reading what others have said on this article, I would have to agree with them Tom's has gone down in the world, as a journo, you might have credentials up to wazoo, as someone with a bit tech knowledge you have a rather limited experience and best not open your mouth to much as you keep putting you're foot in it..

I'm not trying to belittle you so don't try to belittle us, you have the power to guide others to choose the right option to buy any given product, by dumbing down any article to entice other less technical readers to read your publication it only reflects bad on the site and makes the reviewer look like a complete ass, because they come across as an idiot that has written the article which what spills out their mouth is no more than boffin tech from the vendor and comes across like a moron has written it as they have none or limited technical experience in the field they're writing about..

Whether it's tom's guide or tom's hardware, you should strive to meet the quality of review that tom's has had in the past regardless of which site you write for, failure to do this anything you write in the future isn't going to be taken serious and makes you look like an idiot when you try to explain yourself then start arguing with the the avid fans because you don't like what they are telling you... before replying to what I've said try re-reading what you have stated in the the article then re-read what the posters to this article and take what they said as a constructive criticism, failure to do this only makes you look stupid...