Western Digital’s ShareSpace is a capacious four-drive NAS appliance aimed at the home or small office.

But despite its size, the four disks and sizeable fan, the ShareSpace is a fairly quiet and efficient unit.

The 80mm fan goes about its business unobtrusively, and an idle power draw of just 31W compares favourably with its rivals.

The four 1TB Western Digital GreenPower drives in the review unit were installed in a RAID5 array as standard. RAID5 combines the performance benefits of RAID0 with the safety of RAID1. Any one of the drives can fail without data loss.

There’s no facility for hot-swapping drives, but replacing them is straightforward: you just slide out the failed drive, attach the plastic caddy to the new drive and slot it back in. But you’re limited to Western Digital drives only.

While the ShareSpace might not be the fastest NAS drive here, it’s far from sluggish. Large files were written to the drive at 16MB/sec, and reading them back saw that figure rise to 23MB/sec. Small files were more challenging, but write and read figures reached 12MB/sec and 20MB/sec respectively.

Media-buffs will be disappointed by the rather mean provision of an iTunes server and little else, but the ShareSpace does have good support for user accounts and quotas, and the integrated MioNet service allows for remote access to files and folders.

But while this is enough to gain the ShareSpace a good Features & Design score, elsewhere it isn’t quite quick enough or cheap enough to grab itself an award this month.