Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220 2-Bay 2TB (2 x 1 TB) Network Attached Storage ST320005LSA10G-RK

I admit I was hesitant to order the BlackArmor 220, based on all the negative reviews and reported problems. I did end up ordering it since I needed a NAS and the competing systems were equally poorly reviewed. The differentiator was the print server, which I wanted.After only a few hours, I had it up and running, and had accomplished the following:Hardware installation and configuration. DONEWired Windows Vista client configured. Music and pictures uploaded. DONE.Wireless Windows 7 client configured. One-click full backup of PC. DONE.Accessed shares from web. Uploaded and downloaded files. DONE.Invited friend to access a folder. He set up an account and got his files. DONE.I have not yet set up the printer server or media streaming, but I am confident those will also work as advertised. The key is to follow the instructions. The manual is almost 60 pages and there is just no way around reading it. I am convinced that many of the reported problems come from not following the instructions. One key is that you have to set up an admin account, but that account cannot access files. At a minimum, you must create a second account to access files. This is well documented, if somewhat counter-intuitive to some people.The included Acronis software is excellent. I have used Acronis before and was able to re-image a POS system in less than an hour. The BlackArmor comes with 5 licenses (which sell for $31 each on Amazon). The BlackArmor version is truly one-click. It finds the NAS and creates the image in the background with very low CPU usage. The final image is suprisingly smaller than the disk usage. Fantastic, and a great included bonus.I had no trouble with the defaults, NTP is running and not interfering. DHCP works fine. If the drive isn't found right away, try closing and re-opening the Discovery program. If applications don't see the share, reboot and try again. These simple steps were all the "debugging" I had to do. That said, this is not a thumb drive, and some knowledge of networks will be required to make sense of the NAS and configure it correctly.As far as performance, I would say it is noticeably slower than a local hard drive, but acceptable. The web access is significantly slower, but still usable.My wish list is for an Android and iPod client, although the web client does work on these platforms, it is not formatted for the small screens so it is somewhat clumsy. One minor suggestion -- have the discovery program open the default browser for administration, instead of seeking out IE. Firefox and Chrome work fine.If in the future I have a disastrous failure caused by the Seagate, or can't get the other features working, I will revise this review. However, out of the box, I'm breathing a big sigh of relief. Everything is working and doing what I bought the unit to do.UPDATE 7/19/14: I set up print and media server services and used them with no problem. After almost 3 years of running, one of the drives died. The unit wouldn't boot up and made a clicking noise. I bought a replacement drive (from the recommended list, same size, but a different model number than the original), followed the on-line tutorials to replace the drive and rebuild the RAID. Everything worked fine and the unit came back up with no data loss.

Its a shame because this box is a very attractive looking piece of equipment, has no downtime (and mine has been up for over a year now), and didn't have any bugs you needed to sort out before you began using it.Unfortunately, the biggest killer for this device is its speed. I'm using an Asus RT-N66U router and wired to it to give this thing the best advantage it can have, but regardless of whether you are wired to it or on wireless, I cannot eek out more than 5 MB/sec across the network in basic file transfers. It works, and for small files this ends up being nothing, but if you are going to move large amounts of individual files, you definitely need to compress them first. I tried moving 1,000 various files in a folder (pictures, documents, etc) and it took FOREVER, every time it goes to initiate a new file down the line there is a big lag in between. This is a killer for anyone backing up either large files or lots of small ones.The other pit is the interface. It works well, but you need to know how to use it. I would definitely NOT recommend this product unless you are technically inclined, as setting up user accounts and FTP access does require a bit of know-how, and the most baffling thing of all is in how you go about setting up their GLOBAL ACCESS. You cannot do it from the administration login. you must do it from a subordinate user account and for EACH subordinate account, I set it up in the event my ip changed (it rarely does but get caught with your pants down once and you know why you set these things up, as it goes over the internet and your box broadcasts to their servers; as long as its on the internet it can't get lost). Unfortunately, the global access is painfully slow because its adds a middleman in the routing process, which is Seagate's servers.Overall, if you are looking for a (relatively) cheap way to set your self up with a basic way to access your info on the go or centralized network access and don't mind a lunch break to do it, give this a thought. It works, and it works consistently, just don't think about eithera.) attempting this venture if you haven't looked up some port forwarding information in the past or ever worked something needing forwarding, andb.) if you think you are reasonably going to use their global access, its far too slow. FTP is the only way to go with this product.I have read that the Synology (I hope I spelled that right) brand of network storage drives has wonderful products, I never used one but it might be worth a look.