DarkVision Hardware has posted a review of the Netgear Storage Central SC101 SAN product here on their website. The SC101 is a cost effective way to add network storage to your home or small business environment. It’s basically an empty enclosure which allows you to store two IDE hard drives inside. You then plug the SC101 to your network and install Windows drivers on each machine that you want to have access to the device. After some configuration, every Windows PC has access to the the networked storage device – either with it’s own partition or to a shared partition.

One downside thus far – the device only has drivers for W2K and Windows XP SP1/2. Vista support will be coming early next year.

I actually almost reviewed the product myself since I got it for my home but I ended up returning it (it was on sale at Staples) only because of the lack of Vista support at this time. It was a cinch to set up but I wasn’t crazy about the notion of having to install drivers on each machine to make it accessible on that machine.

Here’s the verdict on the SC101 from the folks at DarkVision:

This is not a prefect technical solution and is unsatiable for anything larger than a typical home or micro office environments. 6/10 for design and implementation, 9/10 for effort and usefulness.

One great thing going for it - it’s cheap (around $70 bucks or so).

[Check it out]

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