It never ceases to amaze us what gets crammed into even the smallest NAS devices, and ZyXEL's new NSA310 1-bay Media Server is a good example. Available as an empty enclosure for £59.99 (inc. VAT) or populated with a 2TB drive for around £140, it offers many features more usually associated with larger multi-bay models. It's an updated version of the existing NSA210 model, with some added goodies.

Our review sample was the empty enclosure, and we tried an old 500GB Maxtor STM3500418AS 3.5in. SATA hard disk (it doesn't support PATA or 2.5in drives) - this particular drive doesn't appear on ZyXEL's official compatibility list, but we encountered no problems with it. Installation was a simple matter of removing the front panel and slotting it into the metal bay.

There are no securing screws, and as the drive we used was a slimline model (2cm thick) it was free to flap about alarmingly as there's no packing provided. A chunk of Blu-Tack solved the problem temporarily, but we'd advise making sure your hard drive is a full-fat (2.5cm thick) model.

Getting started
After this little bit of bodging, we connected up the external power brick and Gigabit LAN and ran the supplied ZyXEL NAS Starter Utility. A wizard takes you through the basic discovery, initialisation and configurations steps very quickly, including setting up local users, before optionally launching the Zpilot desktop widget onto which you can drag and drop files for sending to the NAS. It also helps with common tasks such as mapping shared folders to drive letters.

The web interface has icons for each media type, and media can be played directly in your browser using Windows Media Player or VLC plugins. The interface is reasonably responsive and easy to use, if a little quirky in places. It supports multiple 1080p video streams, and it handled a wide selection of video formats with no trouble.

So far, so ordinary - but opening the administration menu reveals the NSA310's party trick - the large range of downloadable add-ons ('packages'). These include a backup and restore feature (for data on the NSA310 itself), SMART drive monitoring, DynDNS, NFS, TFTP, Emule and SqueezeCenter support. This latter requires the phpMyAdmin/MySQL/PHP package, as do the Photo Gallery and Wordpress blog hosting packages. It's an impressive selection for a device of this class.

Company: ZyXEL

Website: http://www.zyxel.co.uk/

Contact: ZyXEL on 0118 912 1700

Tags: zyxel hard disk media server nas network attaches storage ethernet