Sometimes you buy something online, and while waiting to receive it you start gathering more information on it. Most often this is something that fills one with enthusiasm and anticipation. But then sometimes you end up with a feeling that you should have made more of an effort to find out that information before buying and — it seems — wasting your money on a turkey. Well, on Sunday I ordered a Netgear SC101 storage device, and I increasingly get the feeling that I wasted my money on a turkey.
I can’t really blame anyone but myself for this. It’s the customer’s job to keep informed, and it looks like I failed to inform myself sufficiently. On the surface things look good — It’s a small device, you just pop one or two IDE drives in it and zap! Instant file server, right?
Well, not quite. Actually, not by a long shot. For one thing, even though this is a network device you connect directly to your router, it communicates using a proprietary protocol. One which is only accessible via Windows. Right there that means Netgear is lying when it says you can connect “all the PCs on your network” to it; clearly that doesn’t cover any Linux PCs, or Macs, or indeed any PC not using at least XP/SP2 (according to many sources say the software won’t work with SP1, despite Netgear falsely claiming it will) or Win2000 SP4 (who knows?). It also won’t work with anything on your network that’s not a Windows PC, and I think that includes your XboX (original or 360).
Netgear also promises that the device can be used to house ATA hard disks from “any manufacturer”, which most people would no doubt take to mean that it’ll work with any ATA hard disk. Think again. While this is technically true, that phrase is clearly intended to deceive the consumer. You need ATA6 hard disks for it, and Netgear strongly recommends using ATA-133 disks, which basically means that you can’t just use hard drives you have but aren’t using anymore. I was going to buy new ones anyway, but it’s a good thing I stumbled on the Netgear SC101 docs, because they steadfastly refuse to guarantee that anything outside their ridiculously short supported drives list will work. So in fact the implied support for disks by “any manufacturer” is yet another lie by Netgear! Jesus Christ, you’d think that Netgear was affiliated to the Republican Party, they lie so much.
The claims of expandability printed on the box also don’t make any sense. I guess the SC101 is “expandable” by buying another SC101… because you cannot access data from the disks used by one SC101 if you put it directly on a PC. You see, the SC101 uses a proprietary file system, so its data is unreadable by a computer. Nor can you take a hard disk with data on it and put it into the SC101. Well, you can, but the first thing the SC101 will do is erase all your data. So don’t do it.
All in all, I’m very disappointed in myself for buying the SC101. And very disappointed in Netgear for releasing this masqueraded bit of proprietary crippleware upon the world with false pretenses all over its packaging.
Actually I’m quite sure that I won’t be doing business with Netgear at all anymore, and for a few reasons. For one thing, they’re just dishonest (I think we covered that above…). Also, they don’t seem to be too interested in customer service. You see, they used to have these support forums so that users could exchange tips and tricks, and bring things to the company’s attention. Well, I guess that those forums must have worked to well, because they shut them down. That’s right, Netgear killed its support forums. This means that all the support forum links that appear in every review of the SC101 are inaccessible, preventing the customer from finding out what’s wrong with the product. Very clever. Too clever by half, really. The handful of FAQ entries that replaced the forums are a pretty weak alternative.
So, clearly I’m not approaching this experience with a very positive mindset. On the positive side, the SC101 is inexpensive. It only cost me a little over $100 Canadian. I’ll be posting again tomorrow with a review of the product in action. If it’s anything like what the reviews mention, I have a feeling that this will leave me regretting that I hadn’t bought something a little more expensive, but a lot better…