Welland NetShare ME-747AN-S

Welland’s NetShare ME-747AN-S is a one-bay NAS enclosure, compatible with any 3.5-inch SATA I/II hard drive. For test purposes, I fitted a 500GB drive from Seagate (7200RPM, 8MB cache, SATA 3Gbps).

Drive installation is easy enough – undo two screws, slot the drive in, replace the screws and you’re done.

Software setup is interesting, in that there really isn’t any. There’s a mini-CD included with a manual and software application, which is run from the disc rather than being installed. This utility scans your network and detects all the NetShare devices present, then allows you to map their shares to network drives or launch the drive’s browser-based configuration interface. Mapping drives takes exactly as much technical know-how as it does through Windows directly, so it’s not really saving you any trouble.

The on-device interface is actually pretty nice – it’s clean and not overly complex though there are some difficult-to-find options. User account configuration is hidden under “SMB Server” – even if you do know what that is, it hardly seems the correct place for it.

Security is handled through a simple user-account model. Each user account has an associated shared folder which can be accessible to them only, read-only to everyone, or read-write by everyone. There’s no way to have groups of users, or grant just two or three specific users access to a certain share. It should cover basic home use just fine, and does at least simplify the mapping between users and shares as much as possible.

Media streaming via UPnP AV is supported, but you have to install software onto the NetShare, via its web interface. The software is provided on the CD, so I’m unsure as to why it’s not pre-loaded. The NetShare can also act as an iTunes server, but the same kind of installation is required. Included straight out of the box is a BitTorrent client, which is simple and usable.

The NetShare’s speed over the network, unfortunately, is atrocious – averaging just 3.5MBytes/sec read and 4.3MBytes/sec write. This is an order of magnitude lower than some of its competitors, and disappointing indeed if you’re intending to work with large files. Performance will depend on the drive you’re using, but we were unable to achieve better results than shown here with any drive we tested.

The speed makes it less than ideal for a home NAS, but it does have one niche usage: use it to torrent files to its internal hard drive, then connect the NetShare directly to your PC via its eSATA interface. Pull the torrented files off at awesome speed, then clear the drive and repeat. If you’re a heavy BitTorrent user, this really will save you time and effort.