Seagate GoFlex Home (1TB)

Seagate’s GoFlex Home is a single-drive NAS unit separated into a ‘dock’ and removable drive, allowing you to upgrade your storage capacity in future.

Physical setup is simple – connect Ethernet and power cables to the dock, plug in the drive, and press the power button. It’s slightly more complex than something totally all-in-one, but I can’t see a way to get things wrong: the drive only fits in the dock one way, and snaps obviously into place.

The GoFlex includes a single USB port to which you can connect further external storage. Alternatively, connect a compatible printer to that USB port and print remotely from any computer on your network. As we were focussing on storage, I didn’t test the print functionality: success will vary based on your printer’s make and model.

Software setup is simple in concept, but can be rather complex in execution. The bundled CD installs Seagate Dashboard and Memeo Instant Backup software. However, it took half an hour of restarting my router, restarting the GoFlex, then eventually changing the DHCP settings on my router before the Seagate Dashboard software would recognise the drive. I’m still not sure precisely what the issue was, but it gave me a bad first impression.

Once connected successfully, drive configuration proved slow, with many “please wait” screens on the PC between steps.

Security setup is comprehensive: the GoFlex allows multiple user accounts, and lets you control which accounts can add, modify and delete user accounts themselves. It can all be configured through desktop software, or from any computer (with or without the Seagate software) via the GoFlex’s browser-based interface.

The included Memeo Instant Backup software is easy to use. Files are automatically backed up as they’re changed: no scheduling is required. The drive is also suitable for Windows or Apple Time Machine backup services.

In addition to DLNA, UPnP AV and Windows Media Connect for streaming media to your game console or media player, the GoFlex has a media sharing system with a web front end, including a video player in Flash – like your own personal YouTube. The service also works over the internet, with Seagate’s servers handling the routing: you don’t even need to know your own external IP address. Or, for that matter, what an IP address even is.

The online video streaming is ridiculously easy to configure – perhaps the simplest thing on the device altogether. However, trying to watch a 2.5 minute 720p video clip over the internet took almost an hour of buffering before I was able to play it.

Outwardly this appears to be a limitation of New Zealand’s low upload speeds, and to a point that’s true. However, it appears that video streams to the viewer at its original resolution, regardless of the bandwidth available. There’s no option to downscale video to lower resolutions or quality levels on the fly. True, that would be asking an awful lot from a $129 home NAS box – probably too much. That said, it’s disappointing that such an awesome feature is implemented in such a basic way that it just plain won’t work for us New Zealanders. Unless, that is, your video is all stunningly low-resolution to begin with.

Read and write speeds are impressive compared to many competing products, with an average 24MBytes/sec read and 32MBytes/sec write when dealing with large files. However, it’s far from the fastest out there: the Western Digital MyBook Live is a very similar product that for just under double the price, will give you just over double the read and write speed.

Altogether? A good NAS device, if a little difficult to configure. It’s just sad that its most novel feature – easy online media access – is hindered by its inability to downscale media to deal with our local bandwidth limitations.