The Network Space is a single-drive inexpensive no-frills NAS supporting basic file sharing, backup and media serving. It is available in 500 GB and 1 TB capacities. The 500 GB version was tested.
The glossy black plastic case has a footprint slightly larger and about 2X as high as the Samsung Spinpoint HD502IJ 500 GB 3.5" SATA hard drive it encloses.
Power consumption is 11 W with no idle drive spindown or programmable shutdown / startup. Noise level is very low since there is no fan and drive noise is unnoticeable.
CIFS/SMB file access is supported and password-protected FTP can be enabled. There are also UPnP AV media and iTunes servers. Three licenses each of Genie Backup Manager Pro (Windows) & Intego Backup Manager Pro (Mac OS) are bundled for client backup. Manual backup to / from internal and external USB drives can be done and auto-backup of a USB drive can be enabled.
The Network Space barely edges out the original Western Digital My Book World Edition as the second slowest NAS with 6.4 MB/s write and 7.6 MB/s read with a Gigabit LAN connection. Only Linksys routers with built-in USB drive sharing are slower. Performance with a 100 Mbps LAN connection was not much different, measuring 5.7 MB/s write and 7.2 MB/s read. The product consistently failed to complete iozone performance testing using a 1000 Mbps LAN connection and 4k jumbo frames, due to network connection failure.
See the slideshow for more details and use the NAS Charts to compare the Network Space to other NASes.