Makes a nice home fileserver

I bought this Hawking network area storage device to use at home, after my wife's laptop crashed and (almost) caused her to lose just about every piece of valuable digital data that she's ever owned. Thankfully, I was able to hook the drive from the dead laptop up to my PC via an adapter, and yanked the pertinent data off; otherwise, it truly would have been a sad day in Muddville.

This served as a reminder of why doing backups of critical data is so important, and thus I went forth, looking for a simple and straight-forward solution for our needs. The Hawking was the answer I found.

For what we're using it for, the unit is perfect. I already had a 120-gig drive sitting around to install into the chassis (make note: the storage unit does not come with a drive!), so it was a matter of hooking the drive up and plugging it in. Setting the unit up was relatively painless, and soon I had created a share on our home network that would allow us to push gobs of files down to the Hawking fileserver for that added piece of mind.

For most home users, this sort of setup is more than sufficient.

However (you knew it was coming), for those of you that are looking to set more restrictive access/permission settings on the unit, you're going to be a little frustrated. Setting permissions on this thing is painful, if not slightly impossible. I didn't work at getting permissions set up on it for very long (since it didn't really pertain to my deployment needs), but the time that I did spend did not give me warm fuzzies about the prospect. I can't comment about its FTP server abilities; again, it fell out of the scope of my needs. If you're a small business looking for a relatively cheap solution for networked storage and FTP/Web capabilities, you might check out a SnapServer appliance instead.

If you're a home user looking for a simple solution for backing up your data to a networked hard drive, this will probably work for you.