Emprex NSD-100 P2P Download Engine

i bought one of these but new nothing about computers and networking the company helped me as i thought the item was faulty but was my lack of knowledge great item for storing my files and ftp works great can watch films on laptop wireless whilst this sends the film from anywhere the emprex nsd 100 is set up had this item for over a year now superb

This is a great idea, cheap and effective. But you need to know something about networking to get the most out of it. Needs some enhancement to make it easier for non-technically savy people. Updated to my initial review. 1) Printer bit works great. You need to make sure the printer drive is on all the PCs you want to share the printer with. 2) Seems to accept an old style external harddrive case fitted with an IDE type harddrive (200gbytes). 3) Does NOT seem to work with a newer external harddrive case fitted with samsung spin point 1tb, or 2tb WD sata harddrive. If someone can advise on an external case which I can fit a 2TB SATA drive to, that would work with the NSD 100 it would be very much appreciated. Box seems to freeze when I use this, but the box doesn't report any errors. Access to the printer froze as well. Have to disconnect it and power box off/on (yes, that oldie IT chestnut still works). 4) Doesn't support NTFS, if you use the recommended XFS format on the drive you won't be able to plug your drive directly into your pc to read it. So if the NSD 100 blows up, you'll have to buy a new one to get access to the drive. For this reason I would suggest this box provides a wonderful method of sharing data, but I would NOT recommend it as a back-up solution. 5) The issue pointed out in 3 isn't mentioned in manual. IT doesn't state any technical details about the type of external harddrives that can be used with the NSD 100 box e.g. max drive size, SATA/PATA or IDE type drive, max buffer size on drive... and so on... 6) No progress bar shown while the box is formatting the drive, a bit annoying not knowning what was going on with the drive. 7) I set up a share on my box and filezila to ftp from another pc across the internet - worked really well and reasonably fast ( need to do a bit of work on your router to get this working through - port forwarding, or DMZ etc ). Not tried the media, or bit torrent parts of the box yet, so cannot comment on these bits.

ok

Potentially a 'Killer' product, feels almost like a 'proof of concept' rather than a truly finished product. I had to flash the units bios before I could even use the torrent engine. Not too difficult to setup for an intermediate or advanced user but would probably be frustrating for a computer novice to use I think this item shows great promise for a future refined product but the interface needs to allow greater control of torrents & email notifications (torrents v.slow to download & email function wont work if your ISP restricts your outgoing email address which many now do to reduce spam abuse ! Accept this for what all its limitations and you can still enjoy adding NAS storage to your network & download torrents with your PC switched off both saving power and noise as the device emits no noise that I could detect. Note: As yet I have not tried the media server or print server functions.