Well, I recently purchased a Freecom Network Drive from Freecom themselves and so far I’m having no end of problems.
When it got here, looked fine – no damage physically or anything noticable. Opened the box, checked all the components had come in one piece, and hooked it up to my router. Then went to the computer, checked the network had recognised it and it had. Click its logo and hang on… very slow…
So I tried going to the config page and seeing if I needed to set anything up. Still very slow but I got in – hard drive recognised, all seemed to be OK.
Several hours later I still couldn’t work it out. It was taking 30 seconds or so to load a page and adding a new folder resulted in an error and the a crash. I didn’t even bother trying to put a file on it.
As a last resort, I did a hard reset and tried again, and now its not even detecting a hard drive.
I will be sending back to Freecom and if they wont fix it I’ll be requesting my money back and I will look elsewhere. It seemed like a really good deal because I’d heard how good the Network Drive Pro’s were and the prive for a standard 500gb drive seemed almost too good to be true compared to many other companies.
So, if you want my advise, if you need a simple network drive for your home, don’t look at Freecom.
There are updates to this post at:
(21st Oct 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/10/21/update-on-the-faulty-freecom-drive/
(4th Dec 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/12/04/update-on-the-freecom-network-drive/
(13th Dec 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/12/13/the-working-freecom-network-drive-review/