Well that’s pretty obvious but I bet we all have made poor decisions to install software or buy a new bit of kit before carrying out a proper review of information available on the web. I would also add to this that being an “Early Adopter” can be fun and all very cutting edge but this is often referred to as the “Bleeding Edge” with good reason. I will detail two of my recent experiences bad and good and the value of doing some good research.

A Bad Experience

About 9 months ago I bought a 2TB external storage device. My preference was to go for a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit as I already had a couple of these and liked the fact that they were universally available over the home network. A bit of searching around on the Internet showed that there was a 2TB FireWire/USB interfaced unit for about 60% of the price I would be paying for a NAS device. The 2TB unit was new on the market but came from what I understood to be a large, reputable company with plenty of other external storage products which had a good track record. This was quite a sizeable purchase at over £400 ($800) so I did not commit to this lightly, but I decided the saving was to good to pass and ordered it (over the Internet). The device duly arrived, I plugged it in and everything was up and running quickly with no problems. In fact I was so pleased that I decided to buy a second unit a couple of weeks later and daisy chain them together.

The second unit arrived and was duly connected up without any problems. However I soon noticed that the second unit which was daisy chained to the first on the FireWire connection kept loosing connection to the PC. This could be overcome by powering off and rebooting the unit but connection would again be lost in a matter of hours. If I connected the new unit directly to the PC things were better although connection would still go down randomly, but if I then daisy chained the original unit to the new (or vice versa) then it would loose connection. I overcame this by connecting both units directly to the PC via FireWire. The other problem was that the devices run very hot, in fact I would stand my coffee cup on one of them to keep it hot. The power supplies ran even hotter which is probably why they were failing as they appear to be under designed for the task.

Then after about 6 months one of the units would not connect at all, the power light was on but never got past the boot stage where the light flashed rapidly (on completion of booting the light should be on steadily and only blink when data transfer occurred). I started to do a bit of searching on the Internet and soon discovered that these units were having (external) power supply problems. Luckily (??) as I had two devices I was able to swap the power units over and this confirmed it was the problem. I duly contacted the manufacturer and explained the problem (via web forms, no alternative contact by phone or direct email was available) also saying that as this appeared to be a known problem would they supply two new power supplies. Of course standard replies came back and they would only exchange on the basis of retuning the old failed unit so no chance of two new power supplies. I sent the unit back by recorded (signed for) delivery about a week after I the unit had failed, 4 weeks later the exchange unit arrived and no offer to pay postage costs. Needless to say I was not impressed!!

A couple of months later the other power supply failed and I was pretty hacked off about that. At this point I decided to go back to to Amazon (UK) who had supplied the units. I felt that the two storage devices were not fit for purpose for the following reasons:

1. Failure of power supplies
2. Excessive temperature of power supplies and drives
3. Random Loss of connectivity

Amazon(UK) agreed that they could be returned for full refund so I started to look for replacements to move the data to before returning them. (One of the reasons that Amazon is one of my favorite Internet supply companies for electronics is their excellent policy on support and returns)

See the next post in this series (to be posted 24/03/2008) for information on how I chose the new units and how with some careful research of reviews you may get yourself a bargain!

Save Time, Effort & Maybe Money - Use Web Reviews Before you Install or Purchase - Part 2

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