After reading about a half dozen reviews online on the Vantec NexStar LX NAS enclosure I decided to get one. I have a small network at home with 3 desktops and a laptop. It makes sense to have a LAN accessible shared storage location to keep things like documents and downloads. We just moved so my budget is a bit limited. The NexStar seemed the ideal solution as it is a BYOD (Bring You Own Disk) solution. I have a few unused IDE drives lying around so this would be cool.

The first disk I tried, an old Maxtor 90840D6 with 8GB capacity did not work over the LAN. It worked fine using the USB connection. Using the web interface I was unable to configure shares on the disk. Bummer. So I put in a somewhat newer Maxtor 52049H4 with 20 GB capacity. Because NAS shares can only reside on a FAT32 partition I had to reformat the drives before installing. It also precludes me from arbitrarily trying other drives I have as they are NTFS drives with content I don't want to lose if I can help it. Back to the 20GB drive. This time I was able to create shares. Wooo! I needed to download an application and figured it was a good opportunity to store this on the NAS box for sharing. Firefox put the .zip on the share without issue. I then attempted to open the archive with 7-Zip . The archive opened fine but files could not be extracted. WinZip couldn't either.

I then proceeded to do various experiments to conclude the following:

• USB access works fine
• ftp writes corrupt files
• ftp reads corrupt files
• NAS reads corrupt files
• NAS writes corrupt files

This failure is so blatant that it's hard to believe Vantec would have shipped a product so horribly broken. It's also hard to believe the device could be so thoroughly broken without any complaints online. I suspect that it's a drive compatibility issue. Somehow these 2 old IDE drives do not work with the NAS/LAN code in de device. Other testers have used newer drives and have not encountered these problems.

Please add a comment if you have any experience (good or bad) with this box. I would prefer to not have to buy a new hard drive but it may be the only solution. I have contacted vantec and hope to hear from them soon.