Welland NetShare GX

Following our NAS roundup back in May, I’ve been keeping the Welland NetShare GX on the bottom of my review pile. Sold as an enclosure only (no drive included), it didn’t fit in with the other products we had on test.
This month we received a nice high-speed VelociRaptor drive from Western Digital for review, and I finally had an excuse to pull out the NetShare GX and give it a fair trial.

The NetShare GX offers a range of connectivity options: Gigabit LAN, eSATA and USB. It also provides a USB printer port, and can act as a basic print server.

I didn’t test out the print functionality, as it’s somewhat incidental to the device’s main purpose (letting you access your sweet, sweet data stored on the 3.5-inch hard drive within).

Setup was easy enough – drive installation really is “tool-free”. Open the front-panel latch, slide in a SATA drive, flick the power switch and you’re away. If you’re using the USB connection (as I started with), it’s just a standard USB hard drive: no additional configuration necessary.

You can format the drive however you want, but watch out; I initially formatted our drive as NTFS – though this is supported when you’re using the NetShare GX as a simple USB drive, NTFS isn’t supported by the device itself. You won’t be able to use the NAS features unless you stick to the FAT32 file system.

For further testing I formatted our drive as FAT32 via the NetShare GX’s simple web interface, which took around two seconds – hardly a time waster.