This is a NAS device for SMEs, which has a Gbe interface and its storage can be configured in various modes. The modes include standard, mirroring and parity. In the standard mode each 250 GB drive works individually but in the spanning mode the drives are grouped to have 1TB of combined space. You will be able to use the entire space and allocate it to different users. But in these modes there is no data protection and you can't recover data if anything happens to one drive. Mirroring and the parity modes are more secure though you have to sacrifice a large fraction of total space for the data protection. It took more than 4 hours for completing the parity structure of 1GB of data in parity mode. In both cases if any one of the drives get damaged then you can immediately replace them and the data can be recovered. It has a privacy feature for the shared folder access along with the read and write provision. The drive can either be mapped or accessed through the browser. The shared folder space can be easily managed by allotting it the name, space, OS supports, backup password, etc. The TeraStation can be synchronized with the UPS to prevent the data loss due to power failures. To actually test the performance we removed and formatted one of the drives. The TeraStation detected the RAID error smoothly. Instead of the error in RAID array you will still be able retrieve the data. The error was removed through the restructure option in the administrative section. The restructuring process of the same data also took more than couple of hours to complete. We feel that the data transfer rate would have been much better with the SATA drives instead of PATA drives. The casing is solidly built but does not provide tool free access. As well as the drives are not hot swappable.

 Bottom Line: Overall a good storage

option for SMEs.

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