Coolmax CN-350 Network Attached Storage NAS Enclosure - Storage Enclosure - 15560

By purchasing and using the Coolmax CN-350 NAS enclosure, I discovered that other reviews floating around the web for this unit are correct. The coolmaxusa.com site is useless. The English on the site is worse than what's in the manual. The support section had a paragraph about how to adjust your Windows Vista Registry if you're using a CN-550 enclosure. The settings as described in this paragraph did not work for the 350 enclosure. Support is non-existent. There is no phone number and all emails have gone unanswered. I don't like the fact that when a drive is installed properly, and the enclosure is correct-side up, the drive is hanging, inside the enclosure, upside-down! The enclosure is 90% plastic and the plastic is thin gauge. This gives the enclosure an overall cheap, flimsy feel and appearance. When in network mode, the drive can only be formatted in FAT32. Under FAT32, the largest available partition is 32GB. This limitation is by design and was imposed because after 32MB many tasks on the FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient. The FAT32 file system is unsecured. The NTFS file system includes security. Saving your data on a FAT32-formatted HDD makes it available to anyone who has access to the drive. The only way to protect the data would be to encrypt it. Without being formatted in NTFS, I wouldn't put proprietary information or trade secrets on a drive inside this enclosure. I believe this unit should be considered strictly "Home Use Only". Before starting to use this unit for my home network, I made sure my firewall hardware/software and anti-virus was up to date! If you want a drive inside this enclosure to be formatted as NTFS, it must be connected to the computer using USB. This enclosure is too expensive to be used strictly on USB. If you're looking for a pure USB enclosure, skip this unit. There are pure USB enclosures out there that are constructed better, and cost less. For me, not being an IT professional, I found that poor English in the manual made the first-time setup harder than it had to be. Besides the poor English, I believe the books poor layout of information will confuse most native English speakers. For example: For first-time setup, the instructions on how to search for the drive under Windows Explorer are found on page 9. Then, the instruction to use the "Map Network Drive" function is on page 35. I was informed that for people in the IT profession, setup of this unit is a no-brainer. They would simply toss the book. Or perhaps, after seeing how horrible the English is, some people in the IT industry would keep the book to use strictly as a source of humor. However, I believe that non-IT people, that are not network savvy, may find this erratic layout of information to be a source of great frustration. After flipping through the manual for a few moments, I found the information I needed on page 35. I was then able to get the drive to be visible in Windows Explorer as drive Z. Both my desktops running XP Pro can access it with no problems. When connected to my Optimum Online based home network, I found that a tiny 10GB HDD inside the enclosure gave me access times that were just fine for WMA/WMV MP3, MPEG-2 and DivX / Xvid. Next, this enclosure should be considered as non-Vista compliant. Other reviews floating around the web stated that many can't get it to work on Vista. I used my Vista-based laptop, hard-wired into my network as a test. It's true: Vista can not find this drive on the network. As stated above, changes to the Vista Registry did not work. Final Analysis: If you're staying with Windows 2000 or XP Home / Pro for the foreseeable future, Buy this enclosure when it goes on super-deep discount or closeout. With shipping included, if you pay any more than $25.00 you're getting ripped off. I consider my self lucky I found this unit on sale, at retail. If you've using Vista or moving to it soon, skip this unit - forget it. Thank you for taking the time to read my review. Regards, Bill ''The Colonel'' N. Your humble movie theatre maintenance man. Long Island, New York
 
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The Fat32 filesystem is inherently unsecured. The NTFS filesystem includes security. Saving your data on a FAT32-formatted hard drave makes it available to anyone who has access to the drive, either thru your PC or via its IP address. The only way to protect the data would be to encrypt it.
 
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Coolmax will use any excuse to reject your rebate and you wouldn't have a chance to resubmit. Read the rebate terms and google "coolmax rebate" to find it out yourself. Go to BBB Website and find the rating for this scam company. I like Buy.com and I personally think buy.com should not do business with Coolmax.
 
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With XP it can be found and used as a nas or ftp. With Vista it seems to cause issues if you don't wait. I set it up as FTP for Vista and access it by ftp://(IP Address). Then follow the instructions on the web page as follows: To view this FTP site in Windows Explorer, click Page, and then click Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer. If you typ http://(ip address) the setup web page opens.
 
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this coolmax works just as i expected. works for nas at home, then usb on the road. good deal
 
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Have a 200 GB Seagate drive that I want to put in this. I know that Windows doesn't format 200 GB FAT32 partition, so I have to download the Seagate drive software first to format the drive. Once that is done, everything is working. The performance is slow. But for my daily server backup that run at 2:00 AM, I don't care about that. Sometime there is connection error. Second connection to the drive always works. So I am guessing it's waiting for the drive to spin up.
 
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Installation was easy, and software set up was no brainer. The USB is a nice feature as well, it might be faster than your network connection.
 
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Windows 2000 and Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 file systems of any size, but the format program included in Windows 2000 and higher can only create FAT32 file systems of 32 GB or less. This limitation is by design and was imposed because many tasks on a very large FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient.[ This limitation can be bypassed when using the Windows command line Format utility or by using third-party formatting utilities.
 
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Buyer beware. This enclosure ONLY supports FAT32 filesystems via network. It will support NTFS via USB, but not through your network, which means the highest available partition support over network is 32 GB.
 
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