StarTech USB 3.0/eSATA Dual – Review

I had a few hard drives sitting around on my desk for many months and I was looking for a way to put them to good usage. I saw this StarTech device that seemed to be a perfect fit for my requirement. When I received the unit I immediately put my two 1.5 TB Seagate drives in it and tested the unit’s capability.

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Seagate Central – Review

Are you worried about your documents, precious photos, music library, and data stored in The Cloud? Ever thought about how secure your personal information is when it is all sitting in a data center somewhere? Instead of trusting your stuff to someone else’s cloud, how about putting it in your own cloud?

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Western Digital My Cloud – Review

Cloud computing is all the rage nowadays. We use iCloud for our music and photos, Dropbox and Google Drive for file sharing and storage, plus a host of other cloud-based services, on a daily basis. The problem is, some of these services can get expensive or lack the security features we need. One solution to this problem is to use a local cloud service, like the Western Digital My Cloud.

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Seagate Central Shared Storage Device – Review

As reported on this site in some of my reviews over the last few years, I’m a huge fan of NAS (Network Attached Storage) technology. At present, I own a large RAID 5 NAS, with a slave unit to back up the first unit. Why? I have this much storage to support my media server. All my movies, TV shows, music, etc., are stored on my NAS, and its manufacturer keeps adding interesting new tools to keep their devices up to date, such as cloud support (the buzzword du jour), making it easy to connect to my NAS from anywhere in the world.

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Interesting, but Ultimately Flawed Audio Player – Review

Pioneer, a venerable name in home audio, has come up with a pair of interesting devices to better integrate the audio part of the internet and your own digital music library into your home audio system, the N-30 and N-50 Networked Audio Players. The Networked Audio Players are part of Pioneer’s Elite product line, noted for their excellent construction and superb audio quality. Pioneer foolishly loaned me an N-30 to evaluate. I say foolishly only because I seem to attract products for review that have fundamental flaws that cause me to write far too many negative reviews. Sadly, this is one of them.

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WiPNET Cable Ethernet Adapter Review

The folks at Wi3 have come up with some interesting technology, supported by a fairly new standard for home networks, called MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance), managed by a trade group that promotes the use of coaxial cables to connect consumer electronics and other networked devices. The WiPNET solution involves replacing your cable TV wall plates with devices that slip into the hole left by the wall plate.

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Drobo FS – Review

The Drobo FS is one of the latest hardware in the popular line of products from Drobo. It is a standalone NAS (Network-Attached Storage) that connects directly to the LAN network. This is the third Drobo I have bought and it fits well in the family of products. The particular interest in the Drobo FS is that it can operate almost as a standalone device once configured. In other words, it is a file server without a server. This device may be an ideal choice for home users or small businesses that need to share files within a group. In this review, we will explore the device together and see if that can meet some of your needs.

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Golden Ears?

MyMac.com’s very own John Nemo dared me to blog by sending me a link to an article in the New York Times about someone who wanted to build a music server, one of the very highest possible quality. He wanted to rip his CDs at full, uncompressed resolution, and use a fairly high-end digital to analog converter in the playback stream in order to extract the very best from his music collection.

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Verbatim MediaShare Home Network Storage Server
Review

The MediaShare has no shortage of connectivity options: gigabit Ethernet, two USB 2 ports for connecting other hard drives or printers, and an eSATA port to mirror to another hard drive. We connected to our local network via Ethernet cable, but chose to not add any external hard drives or printers for our initial tests.

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Rocstor Arcticroc 4T Raid Drive


Today we’ll be looking at one of Rocstor’s newest storage solutions, the Arcticroc 4T RAID enclosure. At first glance the Arcticroc (AR) doesn’t look like your run of the mill external storage solution. It’s not.

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Newer Technology miniStack NAS
Review


After my disappointing experience with a NAS I tested a few weeks ago, I was really looking forward to evaluating this unit. To recap, a network attached storage (NAS) device is a shared disk drive that uses your internal network, or in some cases the internet to share data with multiple computers. It’s a great place to store backups, large media files (such as for home theater systems), archived multimedia projects, or anything else that requires larger than average amounts of storage space.

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