Those who are looking to add some extra storage to a home or office network would do well to prioritise the new NDAS technology, which offers increased speeds of up to 100MB/s - four times faster than NAS drives - plus straightforward setup and cheaper operation.

Iocell's new NetDISK 351UNE uses the standard to claim to be the world's fastest network storage device, and is currently available in 1TB size in the UK. A sleek black plastic enclosure offers access to a range of speedy connectivity that includes an Ethernet port, USB 2.0 and eSATA, so it's off to a good start in terms of earning its reputation.

All of the cables required to connect these ports to a computer or router are supplied, and a straightforward setup wizard installs the necessary drivers, requests a unique ID and access key for added security and gives the option of mounting the drive in read-only or write/read mode.

This must be done on every computer on a network that requires access, and also installs a system tray utility to offer control over security settings, the ability to view any hosts connected to the device and control access, so all in all we were pleased with the level of security and functionality on offer.

We hooked the 351UNE up to a home network and ran a series of write tests to see how NDAS faired, and were pleased by the results. The drive averaged around 100 seconds per 1GB of data. By means of comparison, direct copy via USB 2.0 took around 60 seconds and a local hard drive transfer 80 seconds, so there's very little overhead here when copying across a network.

Iocell lists one of the possible uses for the drive and the new technology as a media server, so we conducted a few real-world tests by sharing some of the content with a media streamer in another room. We were impressed at how it handled even high resolution 1080p files here, being all but indistinguishable from standard streaming from an internal drive. We can't say for sure whether Iocell's claims of being the ‘world's fastest' drive are entirely true, but this is certainly a massive improvement over the previous NAS standard.

We also had no problems when switching between network and direct USB for reading or writing, another advantage of NDAS, and in general were impressed by both the flexibility and performance on offer.

The 351UNE comes supplied with a range of software that includes SyncBackPro, SyncBackSE, InfoHesive and OnClick Utilities, so those who don't already have a suitable backup suite will find everything they need to take advantage of the drive's capabilities in the box.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the 351UNE, though, is the price. Although the RRP isn't anything out of the ordinary, we've seen the 1TB model available significantly cheaper than most rival NDAS drives and at that point it's certainly worth the extra outlay over conventional devices for those who require network access.

Verdict
The 351UNE is a tidy, flexible solution that offers a range of connectivity and some very impressive performance. It'd be ideal for boosting storage over a network and, if you can find it - as we did - at a significantly lower price than the RRP, should currently be considered one of the most appealing NDAS drives on the market.

Company: Iocell

Tags: universal serial bus hard disk drive serial ata network-attached storage ethernet home network media server lucida sans unicode