The Welland Lan Share is a standalone networkable hard drive interface that doubles as a portable hard drive enclosure. This combination of functions will most likely appeal to the home market more than the office market.

Home Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems are following the same path printers took when some started shipping with onboard ethernet. They remove tasks from always-on network support PCs, so disruption to services on home networks is minimised when PCs that drive the network services are off, or just not working.

Home NAS solutions are being developed and received with varying amounts of success, as the technology is still being adapted into cheap onboard versions of what has traditionally been a server task.

The Welland Lan Share isn’t as smooth to get running as most NASs, because it uses the NDAS protocol. This requires each terminal to have a set of drivers and management software installed to access the drive, instead of being accessible by all computers off the bat after a DHCP broadcast.

After we entered the device’s unique login key, and a NDAS driver was installed to address the Lan Share, we were up and running over the network. The Lan Share streamed a pleasing 9.4MB/s sustained over the network, essentially saturating the 100Mb/s networking standard. This would have been higher had there been support for gigabit networking, as local USB 2.0 speeds were a more impressive 32.3 MB/s sustained.

After it responded without issues with an NTFS drive, we decided to throw a curve ball at the box to see how it reacted to different partition formats while acting as a network drive. This proved a disappointment. Our triple partitioned Linux, FAT32 and NTFS drive wouldn’t work from Windows. The FAT32 and NTFS partitions did, however, show up without any problems when plugged in locally through USB 2.0.

It would have been a nice touch if the Lan Share had support for SATA drives, gigabit ethernet and was a true NAS system, but it manages without. For those who don’t want to configure additional security settings, the pre-requisite access key should make it fairly attractive. In spite of its unrealised potential, it’s still a useful device if you want to get some extra mileage out of an old drive.