Patriot Gear Box Network Device

For speed testing, used a computer running Windows XP Pro SP3 with 4GB DDR2 and an Intel Core2Duo E8400. The Ethernet connection used was the onboard Realtek RTL8168 PCI-E Gigabit controller located on the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 motherboard. Connected to the Gear Box was a Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS Caviar Black drive in a ThermalTake Blacx. Testing consisted of transferring 507MB of MP3 files to the NAS device and back again. Times were recorded and calculated to find the transfer rate of both transfer and receive functions.

Our test found that the test files were written to the NAS drive in exactly 60 seconds, which calculates to an 8.45MB/sec speed. Reads took about 77 seconds for the same files, which is about 6.6 MB/sec. It seems strange that writing to the drive was 28% faster than reading from it. Possibly a firmware update will fix the issue.

Patriot has a really interesting device in the Gear Box. It can literally replace a home server with a much more space and electrically efficient device. A simple, web based operating interface means that the device can be managed from anywhere on the network without an extra keyboard, monitor and mouse connected to it.

The Gear Box has just about everything that a home server would be used for. There are only a couple of things that I can find fault with. No NTFS support means that you can’t just plug in a drive from your Windows computer and start using it. The lack of gigabit Ethernet is an obvious one, and one that deeply impacts the speed of the device. Finally, there is no backup solution for this device. Most users would store all of their data on the server (or this case, on the NAS), and the server would have some sort of backup mechanism, such as a RAID 1 array, but the Gear Box requires the user to backup their data manually.

Overall though, the Patriot Gear Box is a very handy device, and is much more than a NAS device. Its functions make it ideal for a dorm room where space and funds are typically limited. The ability to add users with passwords and disable the guest account makes data protection easy. A small office could also use this to server as the printer server and for FTP access from home.

+ Easy setup

+ FTP function

+ Streaming media support

+ Print server

+ User management

+ BitTorrent client

- No Gigabit Ethernet

- No NTFS support

- Print server uses LPR

- No data backup option

The MSRP for the Patriot Gear Box is $50. Please visit Patriot’s [url=http://patriotmemory.com/products/buyp.jsp]where to buy page[/url] to find your own!