HNAS1 Network Attached Storage Centr

I loved the idea of this product, but was so sad to discover it must use a "overlay" to work correctly, which means if something goes wrong you will loose all of your data, and good luck recovering it, it also is very intermittent in its operation and not fast enough for streaming video what so ever. I spent well over 100 hours tweaking, and rebooting to no avail, it is now in my "junk box" oh well perhaps the more expensive ones work.

I bought the HNAS1 because it was the least expensive SAMBA server I could find and I had plenty of old hard drives laying around to use in it. The only reason I needed a SAMBA server was to provide storage for surveilance video captured by my TrendNet wireless IP camera. Setting up the HNAS1 wasn't difficult but some of the shortcuts that the setup program placed on my desktop don't work. One of those is supposed to take me to the root drive of the server but when I click it, an error occurs suggesting I don't have priviledges to access it. I haven't messed with troubleshooting the problem because I can get to the directory I created using HTTP access to the server and that's where I store the surveilance video. It's been running about a month now with no problems whatsoever. The server is quiet and doesn't require any care and feeding.

I purchased this network hd enclosure after running the wizard, and found an ip, and logged in..... I started to configure, but on advanced->character codepage support, I am surprised there's no ANY Asian codepage support this is a no-bone deal I have a lot of audio and video files are named in Trad Chinese character, this crash the unit everytime when I attempt to transfer also, you have to be aware if the host's username is XXXX XXXX, you're recognized as guest, this is another no-bone deal if you're going for low-price network hard drive, pls go elsewhere or if you are planning to buy this enclosure in order to store a lot of files are in Asian names, DO NOT BUY IT!!! don't tell me I didn't warn you

December 10, 2006 Update - The device is still running good after a year and half in service. Reading other reviews about IP reset problems, I have 3 devices that default to 192.168.1.1. I leave the HNAS1 at this default, while the Linksys router and network printer were changed to other IPs. This has caused no problems. I updgraded to V1.02 firmware and this corrected the date/time problem others reported, but this created another issue. On power up, if the time server takes too long to respond, the HNAS1 will time out, thereafter the Samba server will not accept logins leaving the disk un-mappable. The work-around is to select another time server to something other than the busy default time.nist.gov. Check either [...] or tf.nist.gov for a list of alternate servers. As long as the HNAS1 can reach a time server before it times out, the Samba login problem goes away. I agree with others, the device is somewhat slow, but seemed faster when new. I haven't found a way to defrag the drive, as I believe this would help. I want to try the ancient method I once used back in the early 80s on DEC systems, which is to copy everything to another disk, delete all files, then copy the files back. However this is a time consuming and archaic method and I wish another method was available. Original July 7, 2005 review - Michael Collins wrote a nice review, so I won't duplicate his product description details. This is a high quality product, but getting various versions of Windows configured to use it takes some skill. I have limited networking skills and I really struggled to get this configured for my computers. I bought the HNAS1 for use as a home network drive (100base-T Ethernet) for 2 new computers (Windows XP Home SP2) for my wife and I. We wanted to use a common mailbox, and we wanted a place to quickly backup user files. We also have a Windows 95 OS2 machine with a nice backup tape drive to use for backing up the HNAS1 data. The HNAS1 unit looks nice and is well made. The nice thing about being able to add your own hard drive, is that you can use a high quality drive with this fairly low cost unit. So we bought a Maxtor 200GB 7200rpm Ultra ATA/133 drive on sale at Fry's and installed it. The HNAS1 recognized it and used it without issue. The browser interface to the unit is clean and well organized. It's easy to use for formatting the drive, setting up users, passwords, user folders, changing the admin password, or changing the device IP. The HNAS1 uses the wonderfully robust EXT3 journaling file system for the hardrive, which is highly regarded and commonly used in the Linux world. I think the unit might have a Linux core, as the security system behind the scene that's used for setting up the users, folders, and passwords appears very Unix like to me. The unit is also a SAMBA server, which is also common in the Unix/Linux world. It's an FTP server as well. The struggles I had in setting up both WinXP Home SP2 and Win95 OSR2 to use the HNAS1 as a mapped drive, had nothing to do with the HNAS1. Once I got the software firewalls configured to allow access to the device, I struggled to get Windows to provide the necessary authentication. All this device wants for network authentication when trying to map it as a drive, is a simple login ID and password. The problem is getting the various versions of Windows to supply this simple requirement. WinXP Home SP2 is purposely designed NOT to remember drive mapping passwords (a reason to buy XP Pro which does remember them, thanks Microsoft), so automatic mapping on reboot was a struggle. I finally used a batch file to solve this problem. For Win95 OSR2, "Network Client for Windows" and "File and Print Sharing" was required to be installed. Even so, when mapping a drive, Win95 can only supply the same login ID that's used to login to Win95. To solve this problem, a user with the same login name has to be setup on the HNAS1. But at least Win95 OSR2 can remember the password for automatic mapping at reboot. All of this is where the customer service falls short in my view. The manual explains how to setup the HNAS1, but includes nothing on how to get the various versions of Windows to properly map to it. The support section of the Hawking Tech website provide no help at all on the Windows drive mapping issues. I did however get through to a tech support person who was helpful with the Win95 problems. These issues with Windows are the fault of Microsoft and not Hawking Tech, but in my view Hawking needs to provide better support by supplying users with the necessary details to allow all of the supported version of Windows to map to the drive. Having said all of that, once the drive mapping issues are sorted out, the HNAS1 performs flawlessly. It's very fast over a 100base-T network and seems competely reliable. We have no problems with it at all. We also don't seem to have the noisy fan problem that Michael Collins reported. I highly recommend the unit, but you may have to research the Internet and call customer support (as I had to) to get the needed details to sort out the drive mapping issues. The supplied install software wizard seems helpful in letting you know that your PC can "see" the drive over the network, but it doesn't seem useful for anything else. I'm giving the Hawking Tech HNAS1 4 stars because it's a very well designed outstanding piece of equipment. But the poor customer support cost me a few grey hairs, and Hawking Tech 5 stars. In the end, I love the unit.