Digital Home Thoughts: Addonics Launches Tiny USB NAS Adapter

"Ever wish you could convert your large external USB storage drive into an NAS server? Well, Addonics says you can easily for $55. Just plug your USB drive to the back of this peripheral and connect the adapter via Ethernet to your router and you’re good to go. The Addonics NAS Adapter essentially converts your drive instantly into a network SAMBA share accessible by any Windows, Mac, or Linux PC. What’s more, users can FTP to their drive as well as use it as a BitTorrent appliance or print server."

Since its release, some more details have surfaced about this wee NAS. It can also act as a UPnP AV server. However, the NAS needs to format any drive you want, in FAT32 no less, and its hobbled with a 10/100 ethernet port. The price is attractive, and it pretty much sips power, but a lot of compromises have been made. For someone who just wants to have a low power NAS solution to back up some files, this might work, but I have some concerns about it being able to perform the more demanding tasks one expects from a NAS. I have doubts to whether it can sustain one or more HD feeds or whether it can quickly manage large backups like system images. The NAS doesn't provide any fault tolerance either. Until these doubts about these tiny NAS devices have been addressed, I'll stick to a more powerful storage solutions.