NAS Reviews

Introduction

At a Glance
Product	Trendnet 2-Bay SATA I/II Network Storage Enclosure (TS-S402)
Summary	Two-drive Network Storage Device with gigabit capabilities and BitTorrent support
Pros	• Compact • Gigabit Ethernet • Multimedia server • Integrated Bittorrent client • Relatively inexpensive
Cons	• Noisy • No client backup software • Can't back up to external or networked drives • No power save features

The Trendnet TS-S402 is a Bring Your Own Disk (BYOD) RAID-capable NAS that supports either one or two SATA drives in a very compact 4.7 x 7.9 x 4.7 inch chassis. Along with its RAID capabilities, the S402 supports gigabit Ethernet, media- serving capabilities and dual USB ports for print serving, backup or external storage.

Like most NASes, physical setup consisted of not much more than connecting the Ethernet and power cables and plugging in drives. The front of the product has a swing-open door for users to install their SATA drives. The door itself felt a bit on the flimsy side, but you won't be needing to access it much after initial disk installation.

Drive mount on no-frills brackets; just two bent-metal pieces that screw onto the drive sides. You manually plug the SATA data and power cables into the drive and need to work the cables a bit in order to close the front door. For the purposes of this review, I was supplied with a unit pre-configured with two 80GB Western Digital drives, so didn't have to go through the installation process.

As seen in the photo above, the front panel contains a row of status LEDs, a "USB backup button" and a USB 2.0 port. The back of the unit, shown in Figure 1, has another USB port, power button, gigabit-capable Ethernet port, power connector, reset button and fan vent.

Figure 1: TS-S402 Back Panel

As you can see in the photo, the fan vent is fairly large, which usually means quiet operation. But unfortunately, the S402 makes a bit more noise than I like to hear in these types of boxes. For power-usage, I measured a draw of around 18 Watts both when in use and after the unit had stood idle for a while.

Trendnet supplies a Windows-only installation CD that is used for the initial configuration. The basic purpose of the installation is to locate the device on the LAN and do the initial setup. The S402 comes with a hard-coded IP address of 192.168.10.10 instead of being configured to grab its IP information via DHCP. So, depending on your network configuration, locating the device may be a bit of a challenge, as I found in Figure 2.

Figure 2: TS-S402 Detection failure

The installation documentation was a bit weak in this area. But after a couple of false starts, reboots and directly connecting to the NAS, the setup software finally located the S402 and brought up an attractive interface as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: TS-S402 Setup Utility

Most of the configuration buttons in this interface spawn a web browser to connect to the device where the real setup is done. So if you're a Apple or Linux user like me, you can turn back to your preferred operating system for the remaining configuration.