9. Closing Thoughts

In general, the StorCenter was well implemented and had a nice balance between features a simple user would need and those that would help fulfill the requirements of a power user. I was glad to see multi-platform support, which allowed me to use the device on all of the computers in my house.

The built-in UPnP AV multimedia server was also a nice touch for those of us who have devices (like the Buffalo Link Theater) that can automatically detect one on the network and bring up its shared multimedia folders. On the downside, the StorCenter fan's whine means that it probably won't be gracing any living room media equipment shelves and will instead be tucked away someplace where it won't interfere with your listening and/or watching pleasure.

This was my first experience with a 1000 Mbit NAS unit, and I had hoped that it would be substantially faster than the other products I currently run on my 100 Mbit LAN so that I could avoid having to use external Firewire or USB drives for large media file transfers. But while the performance tests showed that the StorCenter did outperform my other NAS devices, it didn't come anywhere near the theoretical limit for a gigabit LAN, or even my own expectations for speedier file transfer.

Still, the StorCenter's performance is better than other similarly-priced products, even when used on a 100Mbps LAN, and its built-in printer and media servers further sweeten the deal. So while you'll need to drag out the ol' external USB and Firewire drives when you need to quickly move your expanding media library around, the StorCenter's other features make it a good choice for a mid-range NAS.