my-Ditto exists in the crowded NAS product space, where more familiar brands like Seagate, Netgear, Iomega and Buffalo already play. For more money, you get more features, like on–disk encryption, WiFi connectivity and FTP services but, frankly, most folks don’t need those additional bells and whistles in a NAS for your house. I checked Froogle and, at $200 to $375 retail depending on capacity, the cost is significantly less than many other offerings and the feature set is great. Dane-Elec’s my-Ditto is a stylish, affordable and solid foundation for your domestic storage and streaming needs.
Dane-Elec USA
15770 Laguna Canyon Road, #100
Irvine CA 92618
877-428 2363
http://www.my-ditto.com/
Disk RAIDers
RAID or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, is a method for increasing performance and/or decreasing the likelihood of data loss. RAID 0 is designed to increase the performance over a single disk by using two or more drives in parallel. RAID 1 uses “mirroring,” writing the same data to both disks simultaneously so, if one fails, the other is still accessible. RAID 0 has no redundancy so, a failure of either disk means all of the data — on both disks — is destroyed. RAID 1 protects your data as long as only one disk fails which, to me, is better than no insurance at all.
SPAN mode spans or concatenates the two drives, logically stitching the two disks together so they appear as one big volume. JBOD, or Just a Bunch Of Disks, is a mode where they mount as two distinct disks. The disks are completely independent, hence the name. Again, both SPAN and JBOD modes offer no protection whatsoever if either disk fails so, caveat emptor.
Article comments
1 - OMas
Correction y’all: Dane-Elec advised me that, despite what Roku’s marketing verbiage sez, “the Roku player is not (yet) DLNA or UPnP compliant.” We may see that Roku functionality by year’s end…
2 - Andrew Ryan
Great review. Its about time we got our own network storage devices. I was getting tired of moving all my files, manually swapping hard drives, or starting clean every time i purchased a new computer.
-andy
3 - stubble_pudge
Good review, I've had mine for over a year an have had no problems. I just upgraded from a 1TB (RAID 1) to a 2TB (RAID 1)setup but I found the compatible hard drive list rather limited. I took a chance and ordered 2 WD Red WD20EFRX drives and didn't have any issues installing them. The even seemed to bump my transfer speeds slightly over the original HDD's that came installed. Even so, it still is not as fast as I'd like (topping out at ~55Mbps for transfers with backup routine being much slower). That aside, I'll deal with the slower speeds because of the simplicity and ease of use this unit brings. Its not that I can't setup a more complicated unit, I just have about a thousand other things to do that are way more fun or interesting :)