Review You've got yourself a big old external hard drive. You've got yourself a network. How do you bring the two together?

Addonics' NASU2 NAS Adaptor is a good place to start. It's a tiny, 70 x 32 x 25mm black box with a USB 2.0 port at one end and a 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port at the other. There's a dinky 285mm patch cable in the box to hook the unit into your router, and you can use the USB cable that came with your HDD to connect the NAS Adaptor to the drive.

Addonics' NASU2 NAS adaptor: compact size, compact price

The unit takes a 5V power feed - there's a suitable AC adaptor in the box - and it's capable of keeping a bus-powered drive pumped full of juice. We tried the NAS Adaptor out with a 250GB Iomega eGo we had kicking around the Register Hardware office and had no trouble using it without its own power supply.

That said, you'll need a powered hub if you want to attach multiple USB devices to the Adaptor. We tried it with a bus-powered mini-hub, and the NAS Adaptor would only see the connected USB Flash drive not the Iomega.

Last but not least on the subject of power, British buyers will be sent the UK version of the NASU2, which comes with a British three-pin plug on the phone-style AC adaptor.

Not a complex port array

In addition to all the network-centric hardware, the NAS Adaptor contains operating system enough to host a basic web server for the administration console, plus servers to share the connected storage. Addonics claims it'll host up to 64 concurrent SMB clients and eight concurrent FTP users. We haven't that many computers to try, but it certainly had no problem simultaneously swapping data with the two or three machines you might find on a home network.

Setting the thing up is straightforward. The accompanying CD has a small Java applet that's used to find the IP address the Adaptor's grabbed off the network's DHCP server, though the unit can operate as a DHCP server in its own right. Since the connection app's written in Java, it'll run on any platform. After it's located the NAS Adaptor, click the Connect button to call up your browser and log into the admin console.

A cross-platform Java app finds the NAS on your network

Here, you've got access to the customary array of settings, which govern how the NAS Adaptor interacts with the network, what services it offers and some disk maintenance tools. The Disk Utility section, for example, allows you to format the connected drive, check it for errors and set the period of inactivity after which it tells the drive to spin down.

The NAS Adaptor comes pre-set with SMB and FTP enabled, with guest and anonymous access pre-defined. Adding more users and setting which shares they can access - creating a new user automatically sets up a private share for them - and whether they have read-only or read-write permission for them is straightforward.

The Addonics box doesn't let you corral users into groups, and there's no support for disk quotas. Let's be clear: this is NAS lite - it doesn't offer the array of controls a full-scale NAS box like Netgear's ReadyNAS series or WD's ShareSpace does.

Check or format the connected HDD from the admin console

SMB and FTP are the only major protocols the NAS Adaptor supports, but it does have a BitTorrent tool on board for grabbing material without tying up your computer. The Admin console has a Media Server section, which is headed "X-BOX360 Media Server", so we assume it's a UPnP server. It's also an iTunes server, so music stored in the nominated share can be picked up and played - DRM permitting - on any machine running iTunes.

Addonics wants $55 (£37/€42) for the NAS Adaptor. Now you can almost certainly find a cheaper drive enclosure with a built-in Ethernet port and a similar array of on-board servers, but we'd pay the very small premium simply to connect up a spare external drive without the faff of swapping enclosures around. We're assuming anyone who's in the market for the Addonics already has a drive to use since, again, buying a fresh network-connectable drive will be cheaper than buying a new drive and the adaptor.

BitTorrent downloads done in the background

We've noted that the Addonics box isn't for anyone who's looking for full-to-the-brim NAS functionality. You get what it does and nothing more, and you won't be able to load up third-party NAS-oriented server apps, like player-specific music streamers, for instance.

Equally, it's not a high-performance product, as much because it's limited to 100Mb/s as much as anything else, and there's no RAID. No, this isn't going to replace or stand in for a ReadyNAS box or even an Apple TimeCapsule - it doesn't support Mac OS X's TimeMachine auto back-up feature out of the box, though with a fair bit of hackery you may well get it to work.

User account support is basic, but sufficient

The NAS Adaptor is essentially a first-step NAS product, allowing you to take an existing external hard drive and network it. Quite apart from the price, if you're starting literally from scratch, you'll probably prefer a single-box set-up to cut down on the cable clutter. But the Addonics unit has the advantage that it'll be easier to upgrade over time, and has functionality enough for most folks' needs.

Verdict

Addonics' NAS Adaptor is reasonably cheap and it's easy to use. It has a decent entry-level network storage feature set. If your home network is NAS-less and you have a spare USB hard drive handy, the NASU2 is a good way to get some share storage up and running. ®

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