Review: Western Digital Netcenter 500

Like La Cie’s Ethernet Disk Mini, Western Digital’s Netcenter is an affordable product that provides plenty of extra storage at a very competitive price. It also provides a few extra features that the

La Cie drive lacks. However, its cross-platform support is poor and its security features aren’t as reliable as they could be.

Another similarity with the La Cie drive is that the Netcenter doesn’t provide Raid support, so options such as Raid 1 mirroring aren’t available. That may deter business users who need that extra level of protection for their data, but it’s probably not a big problem for home users.

ne advantage over the La Cie drive is that the Netcenter has two additional USB2 ports that allow you to connect a printer for network-printing or to use a USB hard drive to provide even more storage.

Those features are certainly welcome, and with 500GB of storage for well under £300 the Netcenter is undoubtedly good value for money.

It does have weaknesses, though. The Mac software supplied with the drive crashed frequently during our tests, so this isn’t a good option for households or offices with a combination of Macs and PCs.

More worryingly, we found that the drive’s security features were far from foolproof. The Easylink software provided with the Netcenter allows each user on the network to create their own folders on the drive.

These can either be ‘public’ shared folders or ‘private’ folders protected with a password. But although a password is needed to gain access to the contents of private folders we found we were able to delete entire private folders, without needing a password.

While the Netcenter is certainly good value for money, Western Digital needs to take another look at its drive-management software.

This article is part of a group test of network-attached devices.
See also
Adaptec Snap Server 110
Buffalo Linkstation Multimedia Home Server
Buffalo Terastation Home Server
Freecom Storage Gateway WLAN
Iomega Storcenter Network Hard Drive
La Cie Ethernet Disk Mini
Linksys EFG120
Maxtor Shared Storage II
Plextor PX-EH25L
Living with NAS
DIY NAS

The table of features can be read via our pdf download.

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