Last but not least, we come to the "Maintenance" menu.

Here we can upgrade the firmware, reboot the LanDrive, or restore to factory defaults.

You can find firmware upgrades HERE

Benchmarks

The LanDrive is not intended to be a speed demon; if you need a super-fast server, you will pay a lot more than what you'd pay for a LanDrive and a hard drive for it.

To test the performance of the LanDrive, I copied a 358.4MB AVI file to and from the drive over the Ethernet, with both SMB file sharing and FTP.

FTP GET: 367024204 bytes received in 99.83 Seconds 3676.57 Kbytes/sec

FTP PUT: 367024204 bytes sent in 84.91 Seconds 4322.71 Kbytes/sec

Ok, the LanDrive is not an FTP speed demon - but remember, 3.7 MB/sec reads and 4.3 MB/sec writes across Ethernet are far more than 10Mbit Ethernet is capable of.

SAMBA READ: 114s for 3.2 MB/sec

SAMBA WRITE: 107s for 3.4 MB/sec

The SAMBA scores were fairly close to the FTP scores, I think we are limited by the processor in the LanDrive.

HDTach USB scores: Burst Read: 37.5 MB/s Average Read: 35.0 MB/sec Random Access: 16.8 ms

The HDTach scores were much better! However using this LanDrive as a USB 2.0 peripheral defeats its whole purpose: providing a central shared file storage space.

Conclusion

Do I like the LanDrive?

YES.

Would I deploy it for simple home networks for non-technical friends and family?

YES.

Would I run it as a server for myself?

NO.

The LanDrive is a really nice product, and addresses the needs of its target market quite well. However, it falls short of what power users need. The SAMBA permissions are too primitive, only allowing per-directory passwords, and the FTP user rights are limited to read-only or read-write users. Both of these shortcomings could be fixed in future software revisions, and I hope they do fix it as the product has a lot of potential.

While the product does not meet the needs of highly technical users, I think it will service the needs of its intended target market - small home or office networks without need for extensive security - quite well. The manual obviously needs some work to make it easier for non-technical people to configure the LanDrive. On the other hand, the product does seem to perform well, so I'd have no qualms deploying it for small home networks, or two-three person offices without any local technical capability. In short, I like it.