Netgear’s Storage Central – Model SC101 (£79.98 inc VAT) is a hard disk enclosure with built-in disc controllers and networking features. This device emulates one or more logical drives using one or two physical IDE or PATA hard disks and provides a shareable storage facility accessible by all windows computers on a DHCP enabled network. A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a collection of storage devices linked to the local area network which are accessed and administered as one central pool, such storage does not require a specific computer to be running for file.

The wizard accompanying the friendly, easy-to-use Storage Central Manager software assigned an IP address to each drive in the device. We could then make up a name for the selected drive and set aside part of that physical drive’s capacity for storage. For example, you can effectively split a single 300GB drive into two 150GB volumes, each of which receives its own drive letter.

Once you’re through assigning volumes, you’ll see those parts of the SC101′s storage that are visible to each machine as a normal drive letter, not a mapped network drive, as with many Web administrated NAS boxes. The SC101 also has a feature normally found only in storage-area networks (SANs): the ability to create volumes that span multiple SC101s. If you add another SC101 Storage Central unit, you can access them separately or allocate space from both units as if they were a single volume. Alas, though Netgear told us that it’s developing Mac and Linux drivers, for now, the SC101 is for Windows XP, 2000, and 2003 Server machines only. For backup for users who don’t already have a favorite backup program, Netgear bundles the box with Storage Sync Pro.

After you attach the power cord and run an Ethernet cable to your router, you’ll need to install the Storage Central Management Utility software from the included CD on each computer you wish to have access to the SC101. The Netgear SC101 isn’t accessed via an IP address like many NAS boxes, but the software is easy to use and guides you nicely through the drive configuration process. However, less technically inclined readers should go over the manual first, and everyone should have a plan for how to divvy up the storage space. The SC101 allows you to divide the storage space, as well as share it among individual users. For example, you can assign part of the SC101′s total storage capacity to your upstairs computer for private use, assign another part to the computer in the home office, then share part of it across all of the machines in the house for multimedia use, file transfer, and so on. There’s no power switch on the mini-toaster-size unit, so home users might want to hook it up to a power strip or another switchable power source for shutdown during nonaccess hours.

Netgear calls it a NAS device and touts block-level transfer as a performance feature. However, this is a network-connected device, so speeds are not going to be out of this world. Don’t expect to be able to use the drive for video editing, for example. A better bet for speed-critical storage might be an external SATA enclosure.