Verbatim MediaShare

Verbatim is branching out from the realm of hard drives, USB flash drives and external drives with a network attached storage solution. The Verbatim MediaShare is a compact and stylish little NAS and we've managed to get our hands on the 2 TB version to review.

The MediaShare is a very good-looking NAS. It's small, discreet and stylish, and is a very well-made and well-finished product. Its weight (1.7 Kg) seems to be inversely proportional to its size, however, as the casing is made entirely from brushed aluminium. It really is a product of exemplary quality!

There are plenty of connections, including a 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet port and three USB 2.0  ports, including one on the front panel with its very own 'NAS Backup' button. Although there is an eSATA port, this unfortunately can't be used to boost the storage capacity and can only be used for drive mirroring. In other words, to back up the contents of the NAS internal drive to a separate external drive, like a RAID 1 setup.

Our test model came loaded with a 2 TB Samsung HD204UI hard drive. This drive is part of the Spinpoint F4 EcoGreen range and has a spin speed of 5400 rpm and 32 MB of cache memory. Note that the MediaShare NAS is also available with a 1 TB internal hard drive and that all versions of this NAS have an external power transformer rather than an integrated transformer.

Here we had a bit of a nasty surprise, as to install the NAS you have no choice but to use the CD supplied. You then have to create an account on the MyVerbatim website, which allows you to access the NAS remotely from any computer connected to the Internet. You must also choose a name for your NAS because you're not allowed to keep default name (as a slightly unclear error message will let you know).
During the setup process you'll soon find out that certain functions and services are optional and don't come free (unlimited user accounts, secure FTPS access, RSS feeds, access from a mobile phone, the 3D Coloris interface, automatic creation of Flickr albums using photos on the NAS).

In spite of all that, the installation process is quick and easy, even if we would have much preferred a less round-about process with no CD and only using a web browser.

Although it only uses one 5400 rpm hard drive, the MediaShare isn't too slow. In fact, it's not all that far behind similar models made by other brands. It clearly makes good use of the Gigabit Ethernet interface:
 

Good performances over the Gigabit Ethernet connection. Performances are within average for an NAS with one internal drive.

Over the USB connection it's a different story entirely. This NAS struggles with its USB data transfer rates and can only work at 4 to 5 MBps while the best models can reach speeds of 15 to 30 MBps.

As well as the basic NAS functions (file server, TimeMachine backup for mac, print server, iTunes server etc.) the MediaShare is geared up for sharing multimedia files, particularly photos via Flickr or Facebook. It's also possible to share photos via the MyVerbatim.com website, which allows you to access the contents of your drive from any computer that's connected to the Internet (security restrictions are obviously in place, though).
Note that there's no integrated download service (eMule, torrent, HTTP etc.), which could be enough to put some users off.

The online administration interface is clear and easy to understand but not very practical to use. It's entirely text based and has no helpful icons. Plus, the layout is also sometimes a bit puzzling, with certain sentences that are too long for the boxes they're supposed to fit in. This makes it look rather messy in places.