Fantom Drives G-Force MegaDisk NAS \ RAID 1TB Ethernet with Shadow Backup - External Hard Drive - MDN1000

Totally unreliable after 6 months of work. Bought two of these for myself and my business partner. Both failed within 6 months and lost all data. Customer service is only available through their website and non responsive so far. Features are great, looks great, but only works for 6 months with data loss. So, you decide. Have updated the firmware to 2.6.3 n . Doesn't make any difference except no longer allows you to change the file server settings. It's a great door stop though.
 
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Despite the noteworthy number of recommendations against, I purchased this drive based on capabilities and my experience w/a non-NAS Fantom drive (which has been working well for many months). After about three weeks, the drive noise suddenly increased significantly. Several days later it went quiet, but only because the fan has completely failed. Now the drive is incredibly hot and I can only get about 15 - 20 minutes of operating time before I have to allow it to cool completely (access starts 'freezing'). Have requested a RMS from MicroNet.
 
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I'm just ordered an HP Media Vault in hopes that I can actually find a NAS solution for home that works. This thing has been a pain since day one. I own Macs and PCs and am not satisfied with the performance of this drive with either platform. I own another Fantom drive that connects to my Mac/PC via USB and it has performed flawlessly since I bought it (2 years ago). So I decided to give them a try with NAS. Big mistake. The first one died in about a week. The replacement has disappeared from the network dozens of times. A reboot >usually< fixes it but this week it has decided to break and stay broken. I tried to copy my iPhoto library to it several times and it keeps giving an error. I checked for new firmware, but nothing new since the last upgrade I did. So I'm done. Since they want a limit of 500 words for reviews, I won't go into the other 5-6 reasons that I can't deal with this box anymore. If you buy it I hope you have better luck than me!
 
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When I first got this unit and set it up it started to disappear from my network after 6 or 8 hours runtime. It was insanely noisy, it sounded like a coffee grinder. I figured it was a hardware defect, but I decided to check Fantom's website. I found new firmware, 2.6.2a-n, so I decided to upgrade and see if that helped. It did, and I breathed a sigh of relief and thought I was out of the woods. It ran great for a while, less noisy, but still kind of clunky. All of a sudden I lost one of my RAID 1 drives and found it rebuilding RAID on it's own. Since then it have behaved well, but I will never trust this unit and I'm waiting for the "other shoe to drop." The Errata text file about the firmware upgrade is very cryptic! The "Disk Sleep" power saving option is now absent and I think that feature was the source of my troubles, and those of others who reported problems. I think they had a major firmware problem they are not owning up to. It is very unusual for new firmware to remove features, they usually add them and/or fix problems. When I first set it up, I set the disk spindown to 5 minutes, probably the reason I had my first difficulties. The LED functions were changed too. Web UI is convoluted and strangely worded.
 
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I've had this drive for a few months. The first drive was defective but Buy.com issued an RMA and the second has been flawless. 1 TB of space is amazing and the gigabit ethernet is superfast for copying files and steaming media like movies and music to other devices on the network. <br><br> The built in ftp server is really helpful for transfering files from remote locations, and the Bit Torrent server is awesome for downloading content without haveing to worry about leaving your computer running. <br><br> The Web interface is pretty basic and has a few gliches, but its easy enough to configure. I found the LED lights on the front of the drive a little annoying because they're pretty bright, but with the most recent Firmware upgrade, they've reassigned one of the LEDs stay off unless they're a disk fault. <br><br> <font color="#336699"><strong> Overall I really like not having to worry about running out of storage space anymore, and the additional speed and features included in this drive are well worth the slightly higher price from that of more basic drives.</strong></font>
 
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Does not mount easily, Too much preset file structure, crashes The Finder when navigating. Failures with less than 2 months of use.
 
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The 1st unit delivered seemed to have missing space... you lose the normal 1024 vs 1000 on the size rating, but now it also appears that there is a 49G partition used to run the device, meaning you really only have ~870G for storage. The web management interface is weak. When you reformat or try to change RAID settings, it says it is doing the task and will reload in several minutes. 45 minutes, you still have no visual update to tell you if it is done or not.. but of course the manual strongly warns against manually powering the device off, so you are stuck for what to do. After 3 attempts to reformat my 1st unit, one of the 500G drives disappeared from the management interface, with no way to recover it. This unit was replaced. With the 2nd unit I'm afraid to even try reformatting to ext3 filesystem, as I simply don't trust the management interface. If Buy.com allowed a real return (like any brick and mortar would), I'd have returned for full or even partial refund.
 
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When I received my external drive, I plugged it in, configured it to do mirroring and immediately started using it. The only configuration change I cared about was to turn on disk failure protection (mirroring) and was able to leave all the rest the default. I have since started moving all my digital pictures to the drive. Copying pictures to the drive takes more time then I expected and when using windows explorer to view thumbnails or slide show it is very slow. I have yet to research if there is any easy resolution for this concern.
 
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Initially, I got the WD's 1TB drive... it was LOUD and SLOW. After reading tech spec's and other user reviews, I ordered from Buy.com this Fantom G-Force (also recommended by a friend). 1st day, setup was easy.... then played around with the drive, setting up accounts, shares and reformating the drive was a cakewalk. Although this drive also makes a little noise, but it sure cut the noise level by at least to 25% to 50% from the WD drive. Cons about this drive: You can do with or without the stand... After shutting down the drive, on the initial powering up, the fan can be quite noise...but it settles down after a few mins. (may my fan was defective??) Overall the drive suits my needs but comes with the standard fan noise, which I think is kept at the bare min.
 
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NAS works well. Although their web site should have all the files that came in the CDs. So don't loose the CDs. Throw the 2 standing aluminum brackets away!
 
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