It's taken me an age to write this review. I really do have to thank the team at Excito for being so patient, because it seems like forever ago that they sent me their review unit and I got it all set up and plugged in.
At first, it was a simple case of comparing the new and improved Bubba|Two unit with Excito's previous model, Bubba. Two boasts an improved, faster processor and double the memory, not to mention faster ethernet speeds and hard drive connections. In theory Bubba|Two should make up for some of the deficiencies of its predecessor.
But then it became a case of pushing the new hardware to see exactly what it could do. And then we arrive here.
I'm getting ahead of myself. First, what exactly is Bubba?
Network Attached Storage (NAS) is nothing new. Think of it as one of those external hard disk drives, but instead of tethering it to one PC with a USB or Firewire cable, you feed it an Ethernet cable, thus making it a part of your network. As a result, potentially any machine on that network can access the files stored upon the disk. Bubba, at a very basic level, is a NAS device; you plug it into your network, and it lets you read and write files from any machine. Your daughter's netbook, your wife's laptop, and your desktop PC can all get to the chewy, moist data at the device's core.
But Bubba is a lot more. Because it runs a form of Linux (Debian, if you're curious) Bubba is smarter than your average piece of NAS. It can, in theory, be made to do anything a Linux computer can. But Bubba is more even than that, because this little box of tricks does everything in 7-12w of electricity.
Just think about that: 7-12w. I've got a small form factor system that uses 100w. My media center, and workstation computers use even more. If you leave a computer on all day doing any of the things that Bubba can do, chances are you're using 90% too much electricity. I've got light bulbs that use more juice than Bubba|Two!
So what can Bubba|Two do exactly? I'll get to that.
When I reviewed the original Bubba back in May of 2007, I didn't mention any deficiencies. That's because I didn't know they existed. Back then I really wasn't using my network in the same way as I do now. Two years later I'm more concerned with HD resolution video, and higher quality music files. The first generation Bubba, while still a workhorse of file sharing on my network, just can't cope with HD video for the simple reason that it lacks the ability to throw the data onto the network quick enough.
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