Installation

The LANDisk is very easy to install and get up and running quickly. 

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It was tested using a Western Digital 30GB 7200rpm hard drive.  Also note that the LANDisk only supports drives formatted in FAT32. 

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When you remove the two screws and pull the unit out of its shell, you'll be greeted with a very large circuit board.  The drive slides in between and held down with the four included screws.

Aside from the excellent build quality, it is very well designed.  The drive and unit connectors line up perfectly and the custom power and IDE cables are just the perfect length. 

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Finally, a networking product with blue LEDs!  All networking products I have come across feature green status LEDs.  This is quite common as it is usually associated with such products.  That is apparently not how VGear thinks, and they have focused more on providing a very high-tech looking product that will blend in very well with modern components.  All LEDs are blue in color, including the hard drive activity LED which does blink on/off during use.  In fact, they look as if they are floating through the black translucent front cover.  This visual effect is due to the way the LEDs are soldered onto the internal circuit board.  There is a very thin piece that extends out where the LEDs are soldered.  Overall, it is quite an eye-catcher!

For testing purposes, the LANDisk was connected to the excellent DLink D-604 router which is connected to my main rig as well as two other test systems that are primarily used for reviews here at ExtremeMHz.

Interface

The web interface is easily accessed from your web browser by simply typing in the name of the device as shown above.

Now, I was particularly impressed with just how easy it was to get up and running.  The interface is extremely user-friendly and you'll be sharing files in a matter of minutes.  Let's take a detailed look at the interface...

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The web interface is very easy to navigate and get to the configuration screens you need to in a flash.  The main "Status" screen provides basic information such as the firmware version, drive installed, drive capacity and available free disk space.  My sample shipped with a rather old firmware.  After visiting the VGear website, I found they have released a new firmware in which they do state is a "Big Improvement" in terms of the speed at which it is able to write to the disc.  I quickly flashed the device and will test both its read & write performance a bit later in this review.

As I mentioned earlier, the LANDisk only supports drives formatted in FAT32.  The "Disk Utility" menu provides some common disk utilities such as Format and Scan Disk.  For example, if you install a spare drive formatted in NTFS, you can use the menu to re-format to supported file system.  The "File Manager" menu is where you can easily create folders that you will be sharing.  I created a variety of folders for testing purposes in the second screenshot above. 

The "Network Share" menu is where you will actually specify which folders and/or data you wish to share, both locally or via FTP.  The folders you create can be easily dragged over for sharing and it even offers you the flexibility of setting security on a particular folder if needed.  One very nice feature of the LANDisk is that you can also set the drive to function as an FTP server.  This can be quite handy for those with static IP addresses.  However, those who do not have static IP's can still take advantage of its FTP feature by using a dynamic IP service.  I will not go too much into detail on this, but for those who would like to use this product primarily as an FTP server, there are a number of free dynamic IP services on the web that will basically give you a static address you can give to anyone even though you do not have a static IP address.  Do a Google search on the subject and you'll find many.  One application I highly recommend and personally use is DynSite.  This simplifies the whole process and will let you have multiple static IP addresses.  Perhaps this is something I will cover in a Guide here at ExtremeMHz sometime in the near future.

For those who do plan on using it as an FTP server, there are plenty of options as to how you wish to share your files.  You can set your preferred port number, set different passwords for each folder, and even set them as either read only or give users write access to the folder as well. 

Considering this is really an external drive enclosure, they do offer many features that are typically found only in standard network routers.  You can specify an static IP address or enable/disable DHCPS functionality.  Basically, you can easily set it to work along with your current router and make it function just as another PC on your network.  Very impressive, considering its extremely modest price tag.

The "Maintenance" menu will let you upgrade the firmware, perform a soft reset, and also let you restore settings back to factory defaults.  Although minor to some, they even have a handy log that will let you monitor all activity, including any access both internally or externally.  I tested the log by connecting both internally and externally from another location via FTP. 

Next: Performance