IONE EN-35N: good features, terrible marketing

I've been on a lookout for a NAS for home use for some while now. There are fancy devices on the market that offer up to 4 hard drives capacity with the ability to utilize those in various RAID configurations. Such things are pricey for what I was looking to do: have shared storage in my home network that would not require turning any of the computers to acces shared images, music or documents. Such enclosures are available widely on the Internet, but can rarely be found in retail stores. Extra pitfall to be wary of, some devices do not act as a standard servers on the network. Such things would require installing drivers on all computers in the network and will support lesser number of operating systems (such is NetGear NSC, that requires Windows XP). I clearly needed something that would act as a Samba server and thus would be visible from Linux and Solaris as well. By a chance found one promising device (priced under $90) in a local Santa Clara store (what a name, "Central Computer").

So, for starters store sales rep was useless. I'm asking, do you have any hard drive enclosures that support Ethernet interface, and surely enough he says, no. Whatever, I still have some time to kill while friend of mine walks in a park with his family (I'm on my way to check out his bad a$$ new PC he built around tasty pieces like AMD X2 4400 CPU, overclocked nVidia FX7800 and such). I look around, and find this lonely box that says 'ione 3.5" NAS Enclosure'. Now, the description on the box was more confusing than helpful. It did say that it supports 10/100 network, but at the same time it did say that it supports Windows and Mac OS only. Whatta ...?! I went onto Internet right there in the store (because neither their tech personal nor sales people were trustworthy as knowledgeable advisors). Surprise-surprise. Manufacturer's website does nothig to clarify the situation. Oh, what the heck, restocking fee is only 15%. I take it home. And it works wonderfully! Meaning, good enough for me. Set up was easy (and no, I did not have to use accessory CD with drivers). Web based interface is simple to understand (if you are used to managing your wireless router, anyway). Hard drive installation was trivial. From get-go I was copying files on it in about 5 minutes (formatting a drive hardly took any time at all). Performance over 100 Mbps network depends on file size heavily. Small files (mix of files 4 to 6 MB) saturate network link to 5%, medium-size files (25-60 MB) - to between 20% and 25%, big file (384 MB Windows swap file, what else would you think?) copied at rate of 2 MB/s (same 23% utilization). Suits me well, so I keep this one. Besides, the bottleneck could easily be elsewhere, for instance in my rusty DLink 614+

Thumbs up on this product from MGE, but guys, you need improving your message to consumer a lot.