THIS NETWORK-ATTACHED STORAGE device for the home is a bit light on features and has some mildly annoying traits. Yet, because it's equally light on your wallet, it strikes a fair balance between power and price and gives you the basic capabilities you need. But while the Linksys NAS200's performance certainly got my attention, it was for the device's sloth, not its speed, and that ends up restricting its usefulness.
Speed is certainly no problem when it comes to installation-an area in which Linksys typically excels-and the NAS200 proved no exception.

Once you've determined you've got SATA-compatible drives, you just slide them into the black-and-silver case, connect the box to an electrical outlet and your network, turn on the power, and run the supplied setup wizard from any PC connected to the network. Follow the wizard and it will ask you to format your your drive. You can choose to run the drives in concurrent, striped, or mirrored mode.

The final gotcha is the surprisingly slow performance, which had little to do with the 10/100 Ethernet limitation. The Linksys needs to speed things up if it intends to play against other home NAS products. On the other hand, the company tagged it with a nice price. A little careful shopping or even hard-drive recycling will get you most everything WHS provides for a lot less money. Unless you don't mind doing a little extra work to make the NAS200 work.

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