| Manufacturer: Netgear | Product: Stora 1TB |
| Price: £148 | Supplier: IT247 |
Introduction
The quest for the perfect networked home storage device continues… we’ve covered Windows Home Server extensively over the past three years, reviewed efforts from Cisco, HP, QNAP, Iomega and many more and those devices are successful, but ultimately we’re still to find the total solution – power, ease, expandability, efficiency and value. Until today, we’ve yet to check out Netgear’s offering in the home storage space, but courtesy of IT247, a 1TB Netgear Stora arrived for review this week.
The product claims will be familiar to regular readers:
- Backup and share your videos, music and more
- Showcase digital photos, jitter-free music and video streaming for multiple users#
- Access files and play or view content at home and over the Internet
- Add a second disk drive for data mirroring in seconds
From that brief description, you can tell that the Netgear Stora is a 2 bay network attached storage drive, offering 1TB of storage (expandable to 3TB with the addition of a second 3.5” SATA drive). The Stora is DLNA certified, so it will share media held on the device with a wide range of media streaming devices, including the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Also on board is an iTunes server (enabling playback of music and video within iTunes) and print server for sharing an attached printer with multiple computers. Pushing all of that content around is fast, courtesy of a Gigabit Ethernet connection and the Stora will support multiple flavours of computers, including Windows, Mac and Linux.
Sounds a decent package for £150? Let’s take a look and see what it can do.
What’s in the Box?
The Netgear Stora arrives in a branded box with the following items:
- Netgear Stora 1TB
- Ethernet Cable
- Power Supply and Cable
- Installation CD
- Installation Guide
First Looks
The Stora is a small, cube shaped device, and built with a combination of high gloss and matt plastics – as a £150 device, you shouldn’t expect too many fireworks in terms of design, and it’s fair to say that the Stora looks good, but is cheaply constructed. The front panel in particular has a number of sharp corners and edges that you need to be careful with during handling.
You’ll find the Stora arrives with a large sticker of the top and front of the device with a warning message advising not to block the vents and showing how to access the hard drives behind the front panel. Unfortunately, the glue on the sticker is a little too tacky, and your first five minutes with the Stora will probably be spent trying to remove glue from the top of the unit, courtesy of a fan positioned just below. The holes punched into the Stora’s top are for allowing heat to be vented out of the device – the base is also fully punched to allow air to flow through.
