Sumvision 3.5" Net Box Enclosure Review

Sumvision 3.5" Net box enclosure



The main reason for buying the Sumvision Net box enclosure was the price. I wanted a low priced network attached storage solution and already have a Hitachi 1TB 3.5" high speed hard drive to put into an enclosure. I have a Vista PC, Windows 7 media centre and Windows 7 netbook and wanted a secure network back-up for the usual stuff; video, photos and music, plus software back-ups. The Sumvision website describes this as "NTFS 630KBps/up 3.4MBps/down", remember that bit. (Upload to the NAS & download from NAS). I thought a bit slow but ok for the price point. I am tech savvy and have worked with computer stuff since buying a Sinclair ZX81 in '82.



So, made the purchase . Opening the box, first impression was good, well packed with everything I needed including a screwdriver but no cat5 cable, that's probably due to the price again. Nice and shiny, good finish, solid and neat. The manual is on one of those annoying little minidiscs, no good whatsoever as my DVD drives are slot loaders.

Off to the Sumvision website I went and downloaded the manual which was obviously translated by someone who learned their English in China.



There's no indication at all how to open the Net-box to get your hard drive in but it's easy anyway. Once you start to work out what they mean in the manual, frustrating at best, you can work your way through the manual but be warned it's not a job for the beginner.



My hard drive was pre-formatted to NTFS not FAT because I wanted to store large video files, DVD backups and be able to access video and the rest from my network. The next bit is easy too, in goes the drive, screws and covers on ready to plug in. Cat5 into the router, power plug in, switch on and the lights come on, here we go. I wait for the drive to find the network, its IP address and it does; all good so far you need to allow 5 to10 minutes though.



The manual tells you to enter http://nas in your browser to get to the set-up, again it works fine. The web page comes up and there's nothing needs changing. The hard drive is already formatted and the Net box has picked up the system time.

This is where it starts to get awkward though. I could not change the share parameters for the hard drive via the network, upload anything or even get into the hard drive which is now named "111 (\\Nas) (Z:)" & a folder called "123". Remember the drive is 1TB? It shows in explorer as 3.96GB free of 3.96GB! Where has the rest gone and why can't I get into the folder 123? It took a while to realise that if I connected it to my PC via USB I could change it to a shared drive, it shows as the correct size and up-load stuff at high speed. Re-connected via cat5 and yes it's shared but it's back to 3.96GB and will only up-load at 344 KB/sec no where near the stated 630KB/ps. So checked the network again and got it checked by a 'proper' network techie, nothing wrong with the job I had done, it's the fault of the Sumvision Net box. This means it takes 4 to 6 hours to up-load an average video file!!!

Conclusion and this is purely my opinion. I have a Net box that has to be up-loaded to by USB which to be fair is a bit daft but it does stream on the network ok for video.

So instead of just having a 1TB external drive, which is what I had; I now have a 1TB external drive!! Or if I do use it on my network it could also be a very warm paper weight.

My advice as you might guess is don't buy a Sumvision Net box if you want a sensible usable NAS on your network