We got personal; we did not double our fun
at a glance
(+) Cloud Nine
Local backup software works well; RAID redundancy built in.
(-) Storm's A-Comin'
Poor setup experience; middling remote connectivity.
If you’ve been reading the papers, you’ve noticed our privacy isn’t as private as we thought, especially when we use the Internet. In response, some storage companies now offer “personal clouds” to replace cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox. This is basically a hard drive or SSD that’s connected to your local network at home, and you can access it remotely and transfer files back and forth. It’s not as reliable as a global network of data servers with redundancies and fallbacks in case of hardware failure, but there’s no monthly fee, and you know exactly where your data is and who’s looking at it.
The Seagate Personal Cloud 2-Bay is an enclosure with two hard drives in it. We tested the “4TB” version, which defaults to RAID 1. It’s about two inches tall and nine inches square, so it needs a moderate amount of real estate. You’ll find a gigabit Ethernet connector and one USB 2.0 connector in the back, and one USB 3.0 connector on the side, the latter of which is kind of an odd placement. The power button is also on the rear, which is awkward.
It came with no documentation. Instead, in tiny print on the device, was the URL: http://ift.tt/1Mm3Hq3. On this web page, you’ll find the actual stuff needed to make the thing work. Several Youtube videos and PDFs await, though we had to dig around to find the actual steps for the setup process. It’s in the Quick Start Guide rather than the manual, and the guide is just a handful of pictographs without captions. We eventually discerned that you must also wait up to 10 minutes before the device shows up on the Wi-Fi portion of your network. No reason was given. This page also has a link to the “Sdrive” storage management software.
When we clicked on the drive in Windows Explorer, we were greeted with another EULA agreement. Then we were informed the device was going to download and install a firmware update, which requires the device to reboot. Twice. The firmware process took about five more minutes, after which we had to re-agree to Seagate’s terms and conditions. After choosing between RAID 1 and RAID 0, given minimal information to work with, we created a Seagate Access ID to access the device remotely. This turned out to be unrelated to the Sdrive software, which for some reason requires its own ID and password.
The Sdrive desktop software reportedly hooks into the “Sdrive” app for Android and iOS. Not to be confused with the “Seagate Backup” app, which uses a “Seagate Account” instead of a Seagate Access ID or Sdrive login. And on the desktop, there’s also a “Seagate Dashboard” client. Which you can’t use without registering the device. Which we couldn’t do because there was an error communicating with the server. We were then given the option to ignore registration and install the software anyway. Which required another EULA agreement. The device also has a web interface that operates independently of all this. You can’t do backups there, but you can investigate the device’s network settings, which are exhaustive.
Sdrive stubbornly resisted all attempts to connect our devices to the drive. The Seagate Backup app could coordinate with the Seagate Dashboard in theory, but it failed to detect the drive when on the local network. Eventually, we stumbled upon yet another piece of software, the Seagate Media App. Using our Seagate Access ID credentials, we were able to instantly see the drive both over Wi-Fi and over a cell network, the latter of which even supported streaming videos. After some fiddling with ES File Explorer, we could exchange files over the local network, and the Media App even recognized our Roku 3 and could cast photos and videos to it. When operating remotely, however, we could only transfer videos and photos using a cell network.
The 2-Bay actually works well enough as a locally networked storage backup device. That part of the Dashboard software is pretty sensible for creating, restoring, and maintaining local backups. And the builtin RAID redundancy is a nice feature. But the actual “cloud” part of things made us want to lie down and stare at the ceiling.
$300 (street), www.seagate.com
| Specifications | |
| Interface |
Ethernet |
| Capacity |
4TB |
| Dimensions (W x D x H) |
9.25 x 9.21 x 1.89 inches |
| Weight |
4.8lb |
| Warranty |
Two years |
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1KnMP3Q
