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A nice impulse purchase at Costco 1TB of network storage, seemed like a good idea, I was running out of room on my other drives.  Too many MSDN downloads and other large files. 

According to the box it came with some backup software and some remote access software. Sounded like a good deal but I didn’t read the fine print, the backup software only does scheduled backups, you can backup on demand.  The remote access software is only a 30 day demo, $8 a month after that. 

The remote access software from MioNet looks interesting as it allows you to connect to the device from anywhere as a drive share.  The documentation omits that you don’t need the software unless your machine is actually going to move off your local network.  You can connect via a normal network share.  You need to read the documentation on the CD to find this information.  The paper getting started documentation doesn’t inform you of this. 

Ok so the out of box experience wasn’t the best.  I have setup the box so I can connect via a normal drive share, it works great with Vista, XP had a little difficulty connecting, net use to the rescue there.  Using the command line tool net is very handy when fixing issuing connecting to network drives. 

My first test I copies 19GB of files to the drive just dragging the files in Vista.  The reported speed of the transfer was between 2MB and 3.6MB per second.  Not the best speed ever, to my file server I get over double that, but my file server has more memory so it goes pretty quick while things are in cache. 

Some Numbers copying a 3.9GB file around, all tests on a 1 Gb network.

Given that the transfer rate is so slow, the backup software doesn’t work and the remote access software requires $8 a month, the device is going back to Costco.   Which is too bad because it is a nice looking device and on paper it looks really good.