Addonics NAS 3.0 Adapter Review

Well, I had high hopes for this little thing.  It seems easy enough – connect you USB drive to the NAS 3.0; connect the NAS 3.0 to your router; tada you now have a network drive that you can reach from all your networked computers.   Well, it didn’t go that well for me.  I connected my NTFS formatted 1TB Fantom drive to the USB port on the NAS 3.0 adapater.  I could reach the web interface and see that it said ‘No drive found’.  Disconnect, reconnect, same thing.  I tried my FAT32 formatted 350GB  external drive.  Same thing.  I tried my 1GB USB memory stick.  Same thing.  Then I tried connecting my drives to the printer port.   All of them worked.  Unfortunately when you connect a drive to the printer port it only allows read-only access to the drive.  Fail!

I called tech support and was routed around several times before leaving a message.  I kept calling and eventually reached a person.  He diagnosed it as defective and transferred me to sales.

At this point my options were to cross ship a new product meaning they would charge me for a second product and then refund me once I shipped mine back OR return the item and have them ship me a new one OR return the item and give up.  I gave up.

Some observations:

• The UI is easy to use and basically intuitive
• The device is very small and comes with a network cable and power cable
• The drive access just worked fine when in read-only printer port mode
• The instructions that come with the device are pretty good
• The company is very small (~17 people).  Usually this means great service like – oh, sorry it doesn’t work we’ll ship you a new one asap and you can discard the defective one we just sent you.  Instead they wanted to charge me for a 2nd one or have me wait for my return to go through before sending me a new one
• The reviews of the 2.0 were sketchy.  Most sites don’t even have reviews of the 3.0.  That should have tipped me off to potential quality issues.
• I hope my product was just defective and that most of the NAS 3.0 adapters they sell work.  I would like little companies like this to succeed selling a useful product.
• This is the 2nd NAS adapter type device I’ve tried.  Someone please make a non-crappy NAS adapter – there is a market for one!!  I know because I keep wasting money returning products that don’t work.

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