Hitachi SimpleNET NAS Head USB 2.0 Portable Dongle SNET
- Extremely small dongle form factor
- 2x USB 2.0 host ports (powered)
- 1x 100Mbps Ethernet port
- One LED for power and status
- Reset button
Product Description
SimpleNET is the easiest way to make your existing USB drive even more valuable! Share its contents across your network, quickly and easily! SimpleNET is a small network adapter that enables you to share and access existing USB hard drives over a network. Simply plug a USB hard drive into SimpleNET and then plug SimpleNet into an Ethernet network. The drive then appears as a network drive on the network. Easy to install, easy to use! ... More >>
I don’t even know where to begin. Suffice to say that it would be easier to use an online, storage provider. An online storage provider would also give you better performance. I attached simplenet to my 801.11n wireless network (as recommended by Fabrik) and it’s performance was WOEFULLY slow. BUT THAT’S NOT ALL THAT’S WRONG WITH THIS THING…nope…check out the Hitachi website. There isn’t even a support page for it. lol…there is literally nothing on their site but sales and marketing crap….the company that supports this embarrassment to the IT community is not even Hitachi but Fabrik. I have worked for several Fortune 500 companies as a consultant on enterprise storage. I am even SNIA certified. I have NEVER encountered a more pathetic hardware release in my entire career in IT. Hitachi and Fabrik should be ashamed. I literally took my simplenet and threw it in the garbage…it wasn’t even worth returning.
Rating: 1 / 5
This is a truly horrible device.
1. It is slow
2. It can’t support two external USB hard drives even though it has two USB ports
3. Support is the worst I have ever seen. Stupefyingly incompetent!!
I will NEVER buy anything from Hitachi again
Only gave it one star because negative starts is not available.
Perhaps Amazon should allow for the skull and crossbones for reviews for garbage like the SimpleNET
Rating: 1 / 5
I grabbed one of these to serve as a temporary NAS after the USB ports on a server started to flake out. Bad move. My first hint was that it just couldn’t handle windows credentials, so I had to enter a password to connect to a password protected share. Fine for home use, bad for an unattended backup. There’s no other security setting on this, so I modified the /etc/smb/smb.conf file to only allow my server to hit it with no authentication. That worked, until I reboot it. It had actually left the change in the file, but connected out one of the two lines I added.
Some more issues:
* It’s slow. The 100Mbps connection is bad enough, but it won’t get anywhere near that speed.
* It’s unreliable. I have to reboot the thing daily to get it to work.
* It does not support Windows Domain Authentication. Despite being based on the Samba server, it just doesn’t support the really good features for getting this to interop with anything more than the home versions of Windows.
* It supports configuration from SSH, and then overwrites your some of your changes on boot up. Awesome.
The good news is that it is just a little Linux box so it’s hackable. It’s easy enough to setup and run and for home use, it might be usable, just make sure you’re using a FAT32 disk attached to it and not storing files bigger than 2GB.
Would I use it as a NAS? No. It’s just too unreliable for the job.
Rating: 2 / 5
i have used this product for my home usage and found it good as it solve my problem for accessing my usb drives over the internet with good authentication facility and can access my personal files anywhere and anytime eliminating the use of skydrive or google docs which have many restriction but its bit slow to transfer hugh files and bit expensive for the kind of speed I was looking for
Rating: 3 / 5
I simply wanted to serve two drives I have to my three laptops and single desktop. My family swaps computers and kids needed to access their homework and other file regardless of which computer was available. This seemed like an affordable solution but there are multiple problems.
- The manual is terrible.
- Device doesn’t show up until you rename the workgroup and restart the device. Manual fails to mention that.
- Not as easy to use as the name implies.
- Device fails frequently – drives disappear, folders appear empty, and it will not delete folders properly.
- Will not pass files larger than 2GB. Nothing in manual mentions this and the error is non-descript.
- Very slow. Hitachi is honest about this fact but since it claims to serve iTunes I figured fast enough. Wrong. If you are playing music that will be all you will do with the two drives you have connected. At least if your files are mp3 at 320kps. Forget playing video files in real time.
- Runs hot.
I spend about 6 hours playing with it trying to get it working and another 3 days watching it fail every few hours. Honestly maybe I got a bad one but since the transfer speed is so slow I’m sending it back. Great idea, great price, poor product.
Rating: 2 / 5