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because the 90's paled in comparison to this...

As many of you know, I bitch frequently, and today is no exception.  I’m not just bitching about slow transfer speeds from a restricted device which should be capable of far more (yes, the N95), I’m over that now, as there a bigger demon in its midst.  One that defies all logic completely, to which I can find no possible explanation, apart from shit-ness by the manufacturer in question.

Disclaimer: The paragraphs below will be boring, and slightly technical, and my contain Vendor Verdicts which whilst not directly opposing HD911′s stringent rules regarding Product/Name Defamation and the Fair-trade and Distribution Protection act of Liverpool 1983*

I bought a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit from a relatively reputable online computer dealer in England at the end of last year after much deliberation and a little mis-directed (and now seemingly useless) research.  For the money, the unit was supposed to be one of the better performers.  At the time I bought two hard drives to go along with the unit, which were one of the faster drives available on the market at the time.  The NAS, an ICYBOX NAS4220-B (you can see here the name of the offending company has been removed to comply with HD911′s policies), flat out refused to boot/function or do pretty much anything with the new drives.

A little time ticked by, and (stupidly) the owner and purchaser did not RMA either the drives, nor the NAS unit in time, and the store would no longer accept the products as refunds, so I used the hard drives elsewhere and shelved the obviously trusty unit for another day.  Over the next few months, I tried the drives with a few different versions of the Icybox’s firmware, and even went to the extent of disabling features on the drives themselves to see if they would wotk, but still had no luck.

Fast forward to August 2008, I purchased a cheaer, lower spec harddrive to go in the unit as it could surely serve a better purpose than sitting in the cupboard gaining dust, for this aluminium monstrosity cost £100, and that could have been better spent on beer or a treatment program for the authors ever growing fascination with the game World of Warcraft, and a level 40 dwarf (sorry, little person) named El-dorf.

You must understand, by this point I had an amazingly profuse dislike for the pre-purchased NAS unit, neither it nor its manuracturer website or support forums inspired any confidence at all in a good product.  But I wanted it to work, at least in half the way you’d expect a unit to function.  There’s an element of pride here too, and an IT guys damaged ego over a poor purchase decision can be difficult to mend, as I usually make good, educated decisions about what a good product is and where/how to buy it.

So the new hard drive worked as it should and I was away, madly copying the collected works of self-recorded flute solos, and bad karaoke-style ABBA renditions, but noticed something astounding, transfers via built in “gigabit” network connection were going unusually slow.  Just to back this up, I have a laptop hard drive that can quite happily read/write at 40-50MB/s for sustained periods, a Broadcom gigabit port that should be capable of at least this plugged into another gigabit port on the NAS.  The top speed for the 15 hours of transferring was 5MB/s, not even a quarter of what I would deem reasonable, and hardware I had 12 years ago quite happily chugged away at a quicker speed than this.

I’ve done the normal thing and taken everything possible out of the equation, tested via different PC, new/different cable, through a switch, over wireless (not that I was expecting higher speeds this way mind you), and chanted sweet nothings at it, but to no avail.  It seems that the manufacturer thought they’d add yet another shitty feature (to enhance the plethora of other teeth-nashing inadequacies), that being horrendous speed.  In fact, I can quite happily transfer over the gigabit network to other devices at 50MB/s, and the 802.11g wireless network at 3.5MB/s.

If I was to review this product, and say something nice about it, I’d say it would stand the test of time as a door stop, and wouldn’t look out of place next to the 1960′s Parasonik tube amplifier rip-off that your parents still have sitting in the garage, it really is that cool.

Subsequently I’m saving up the money for a better unit (with supporting research) as we speak.

* Link to Legal Documentation required, consult this document for further information (#1443253)