But now I have it working, and it’s worked reliably for something like a year now! How did I do it? You probably won’t like my answers, but here is how I use it:
1. Do not use it on a network. Yes, I said that. Get a short crossover cable and install it directly into a spare ethernet port on your computer. Hopefully you have a second, unused port like I do. Or if your network is wireless, use the wired ethernet port for the SC101 using the crossover cable. Regular ethernet cable won’t work, because the SC101 is supposed to look like a computer on the network, not a router. I can’t explain it, just do as I say!
2. Only have 1 drive in the beast.
3. Only have 1 partition on that 1 drive. No mirroring or fancy stuff! (K.I.S.S.)
4. No sharing. Of course, as it’s directly connected to only one computer! Duh
5. I don’t know if this is necessary, but when I shut down my computer I unplug the power cord to the SC101. I don’t like the constant noise of the thing, nor that the drive will probably not last long if it is constantly on all the time. But who knows, maybe my giving it a rest by rebooting it every time my computer is rebooted is somehow keeping it on the straight and narrow path of righteous living.

Not long ago, before my computer was fully booted up, I had jumped the gun by inserting one of those little USB drives. I bet you know what happened– the computer saw the USB first and made it to be E: and the SC101 hesitated, then became F: drive, no problem. What was weird was that the SC101 stayed as F: drive through several reboots of the system (this time without the USB stick) and then just a couple of days ago I guess it got tired of being F: and changed back to E: spontaneously. Who knows why, I sure don’t. But everything’s still accessible and working, praise Netgear. (On second thought, No.)

Tried mirroring not successful.Initially OK but then some computers saw one drive some the other so contents of drive depended on which computer you read it from, gave up mirroring.

Total failure one day, lights flashed but no drives found by utility,……
bought another unit tried it on original power supply to save rerouteing cables, same problem lights flashed but could not find any drives. Tried new drive with new power supply worked ok. Ran old unit on new power supply worked ok no data lost. Swapped around a few times fault always stayed with power unit. Note as the good power unit is plugged into the drive the disc motors spin up momentarily with the faulty unit this does not happen.
All this happened with current firmware and software. Moral “just because the lights flash do not rule out the power supply”.
I still have a couple of problems apart from the slowness and that is drive letters randomly change even after being set up in XP disc management.
It seems impossible to install version 3 of the software if version 2 is already installed as the removal of 2 by the installation of 3 removes files which are later called during the reboot which occurs in the installation of 3 which causes the machine to reboot endlessly.
It seems necessary to remove all traces of 2 prior to installing 3 which does seem more stable than 2 once loaded.

My SC101 containing a 300gb Seagate has just fallen over while I as trying to install a second HDD in the POS. The 300gb Seagate is not showing up in either Disk Mgr or the SCM Utility. When I try ut_full, the mesg is “0 Mirocsan found within subnet”.I’ve tried everything else recommended in this Forum except for trying my HDD in another SC101 or replacing the PSU. Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance – Chewy.

I put an old hard drive I had in it, connected it to the network router, downloaded the software, added the drives and when I go into my windows explorer the drive is listed there under my computers as a hard disk drive. Have no problems in saving, copying, deleting, burning etc from this hard drive at all. None of my data has been lost. I still do backups as anyone should do on a normal hard drive on the computer.

I think it is fine if you use for simple uses.

The first mistake Netgear made with this product was in not making it crystal clear that it is not a NAS. The ZSAN technology makes the unit appear more as a direct attached storage device (DAS). A NAS is merely a file server. If you are looking for file server features, don’t buy these units. Most USB disks appear as DAS, but the Storage Centrals are not as limited as those USB disks.

The second mistake Netgear made was to limit the file system to DataPlow’s SAN File System (SFS). Now SFS is great for sharing volumes and files, but it is not the natively supported file system of Windows. Many people just don’t understand that point.

The third mistake — and this is a big one — was in their Storage Central software. Most of the people I have talked to hate this program with a passion.

The forth mistake Netgear made was in not supporting Macs. Wouldn’t it be great if you could actually share the little piggy with both your Windows desktop and MacBook?

As you can probably see, I am from Newt Data (actually Newt Data Systems, Inc.). Among other things, we license Zetera’s ZSAN technology as well as DataPlow’s SFS. Our intent is to fill some of the holes in implementing products with ZSAN.

We have our own line of storage products (called SwiftStore), but also produce a storage manager software package that allows Mac OS X users to access their SC101 and SC101T volumes that have been created with Netgear’s Windows SCM. Our Mac Storage Manager also allows users to create volumes with Mac’s OS X native HFS file system, and also has a handy provision that lets users recover from a “broken mirror” — another feature Netgear forgot.

Check us out on http://www.NewtData.com.

This product is incredibly poor, and I think my 400gb disk will come to good use in one of my pc’s – am going for a new NAS.

No, I am not a newbie, I have 20 years in the IT business.

So yes, I will cry with the wolves – this product sucks!

After reading all the posts on here, I have decided to sell the unit tomorrow as I just cannot be arsed with it.

With the cash, I will buy a USB storage caddy and a 500mb drive connected directly to my PC that I will backup from the PC’s primary drive (no space for a second drive).

Netgear, you should be ashamed of this product; it’s total trash!!!!!

After waiting the better part of a week, the new unit arrived. I tried the simplest fix first, swap the brick. I held my breath while the unit came to life, at first it didn’t seem to do anything except flash the lights, but finally spun up the HD’s and low and behold the drives reappeared on my computer.

Symptoms of my failure: Drives would not spin up, and the red activity light rapidly flashed, all others appeared normal. There was an noticable ticking sound when the drives tried to wind up.

Moral of the story: I got my drives back online, and moved data to a standard format system. No more propritary formats for back up data. Never again will I use any device of this type (propritary formats) without an alternate backup format just in case.