Home Storage Center (NAS)

As you can see once you created a couple users (not groups to keep things simple) you can share folders, have FTP login, a UPnP server and even an iTuners server.

For a NAS unit all standard basic features.

In fact this unit is even a little limited, however is advanced enough for its primary functions .. and that is to serve files though file-shares to users and or groups over the LAN connection towards say your PC or the Network TV Media Player.

The NAS unit actually runs on a customized Linux distribution and comes with an ARM processor and 64MB of memory.

Performance wise, things are acceptable enough, yet not really fast. the ARM processors barely can keep up with it's RAID assignment resulting in speeds like these on extensive long file transfers:

You'll get a write speed of 7 MB/sec, which we feel is below par. Still, we are not talking about a high-end NAS server here.

Read performance is just fine, and plenty fast for streaming even 1080P content. No worries here. BTW our test READ and Writes from a Sandforce 1200 based solid State disk, just so that you know the client side storage unit is not a limiting factor here.

Overall a simple to use and utilize NAS server, which pretty much is what you are after for what we are trying to accomplish here and as such it is sufficient. Let's move onward to the next component, the Network TV Media Player.