The following is a rebuttal from Fantom/MicroNet to my recent review of the Fantom MegaDisk NAS. Fantom’s comments are in italics. My comments are in standard type.
Thank you for your thoughtful review of our product. We appreciate the opportunity to address your concerns and would like to do so in an itemized fashion:
- The MegaDisk NAS does in fact support Gigabit Ethernet speed connections.
- The first paragraph of the IP configuration instructions in the manual says, “The MegaDisk NAS comes preconfigured with the LAN port set to DHCP”. We will consider revising the documentation to be clearer.
- The wireless section is an undocumented feature, the MegaDisk NAS does not itself have any wireless functionality, but does have the ability to connect via some USB wireless adapters to an existing wireless network.
This feature is currently in beta stage and may be activated by a later firmware. Please note that the Megadisk NAS is not sold as a wireless device.
- File naming conventions are a universal limitation for all mixed network environments. You would have difficulty with moving your files to any FAT32 volume. Knowing that you have files with non-traditional characters in the name, choose EXT2 or 3 for your drive format.
I stand corrected. I honestly missed that in the manual. My apologies. this is a very positive feature, that doesn’t always appear on competing products.
Until I figured the trick of checking my router’s DHCP assignments, I had a devil of a time even finding the device on my network, as it didn’t consistently appear in the Connect to Server>Browse window. This is an issue not unique to Fantom. Most NAS devices that do not have native AFP support have similar problems. I believe Apple has obliquely admitted that this is a problem, but there’s still no fix. Much, in fact, has been written about similar problems on that great cross-platform website MacWindows.com. One thing I did right away to ensure I could find it on the network was to change the network addressing scheme from DHCP to a static IP address, so I always knew the address.
Regarding the confusing text, I read more into that sentence in the manual than necessary and spun my wheels for a long time trying to configure a second router so I could connect to the device at 192.168.0.1.
For someone who doesn’t need high-end features in their router like port mapping, DMZ, and other such niceties, this could be a viable option. Contact Fantom tech support to get a list of compatible USB Wi-Fi adapters. Understood it is not sold as a wireless device–it was a surprise to see it in the function menu.
I fully agree that it is a universal problem. I had very similar experiences with Mac users trying to move files to a Windows 2000 server. Even with the vastly improved NTFS file system, users still had to watch for certain characters in filenames, and had to watch the overall length of a filename, including the path. I had some of the same problems with my department’s early-vintage SnapServer 4000, though it did tolerate the Macs a little better. The $400 bill for the software update to make that SnapServer compatible with OS X was a bit much, though.
As for the dismount issue, we’ve been unable to replicate it using German, Russian, Hebrew and Korean character sets. If you have a specific file name that causes problems we would love to see it. EXT2 in particular should have no problem with different character sets.”
I reformatted the disks with EXT2 format and retested by performing a backup with the included NTI Shadow software. Every time it hit a file with a period as the first character (lots of those as hidden files in OS X), it unmounted. If I persisted and kept trying to move files with a period as the first character in the filename, eventually I could not remount the drive, and had to go into the web interface to reboot the NAS.
If you choose to backup your entire Users (containing your personal account and Shared folders) directory, you will encounter filenames with illegal characters, such as the example I just described, and because those files are invisible, you won’t even know what happened unless you know where to find the log file and analyze it. At Fantom’s request, I sent them a log file from the NTI Shadow backup software. The alternative method of backing up that data without crashing would be to back up each folder inside your Users directory (Documents, Music, Photos, Desktop, etc.) instead of backing up the entire Users folder, which should bypass most if not all of those invisible files.
In summary, I appreciate MicroNet’s rebuttal, which truly clarified a few issues that maybe I didn’t completely understand. That said, I still think this device is much too hard to use for the average Mac user, who should really only consider a NAS device with native AFP (Apple File Protocol) support.
Like I said in the original review, the MegaDisk NAS will probably give a Windows user years of trouble-free use, but it’s unsuitable in its current guise for a Mac user.
Once a decision has been made to purchase one, keep in mind that a NAS device is a very complicated piece of hardware and a smart user/administrator should spend a lot of time with the manual to map out a strategy for accounts and access–especially if there is more than one user accessing the NAS, and to make sure the user/administrator understands all the configuration options.
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