While LG is a relative newcomer to the NAS market, their engineers have definitely done their homework. The N2R1DD2 is well designed and constructed, featuring two hot-swappable drive bays and a RAID system that can be configured to protect your data or use the full capacity of the hard drives. The NAS also features a built-in DVD writer, which serves as a secondary storage medium as well as a way for computers on the network to burn discs and play movies. To top it all off, LG has included a number of consumer oriented features including USB/memory card backup, Apple Time Machine support, Torrent file sharing and a built in DLNA media server.
That being said, there were a few things that LG could have done better. The N2R1DD2's USB/memory card and ODD functions were not nearly as robust as those found on the N4B1. There's also no way to transfer data from the NAS to storage devices, which severely limits the usefulness of the eSATA port. The only thing it is used for is to share an external hard drive and even then, I'd hesitate to do this as there are no security restrictions. Lastly, the N2R1DD2's iSCSI service is limited to the optical drive. I'm not sure why LG decided to do this, but it would be nice to be able to create a few virtual hard disks as well.
Compared to LG's Blu-ray equipped NAS devices, the N2R1 is very affordable. If you want to use your own hard drives, the N2R1D can be picked up for as little as $220. Otherwise, prices for the 1TB N2R1DD1 and 2TB N2R1DD2 start at about $262 and $320, respectively.
Highs:
- Built-in DVD rewriter
- Two hot-swap drive bays
- RAID 0, 1, JBOD, 1 + JBOD and Individual disk configurations
- One touch DVD/CD backup
- One touch and automatic USB/memory card backup
- Built-in backup, FTP and print servers
- iTunes music and DLNA media servers
- WebDAV file management
- Apple Time Machine support
- Active Directory support
- Torrent file sharing
- Remote access to DVD rewriter through iSCSI
- Three USB 2.0 ports and one eSATA port
- Gigabit Ethernet NIC
- Built-in memory card reader
- Easy to use web interface
- Compatible with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux clients
- Good looking and well constructed design
- LCD display
- Quiet operation
Lows:
- Slow read speeds when jumbo frames are enabled
- Cannot schedule backups to ODD or external hard drives
- Cannot transfer data from the NAS to storage devices
- USB and eSATA devices are automatically shared with the world
- iSCSI support limited to the DVD rewriter
- Administrator rights limited to default admin account
