9:00 AM – It’s started. Netgear’s sarcastic spokesperson is on stage

9:10 AM – New Stora NAS (network attached storage) device for remote access content. it can backup and centralize content. Works with any platform. iPhone, PC, Mac, etc. Sharing is damn easy! Easy to generate URL to share content. Modular interface offers expanding storage with matching HDDs. (RAID 1 Array) Premium paid services include support for Social Networks (Facebook uploads) and RSS Feeds for geeks. Even a digital photo frame that connects over WiFi to display content from NAS. Price Point $199 with 1TB HDD.

9:15 AM – Netgear mentions brand new video compression features. It keeps content looking HD-like, but compact enough to be transferred over networks. It’s named weirdly enough Zigxy. They let the audience test it. I was able to stream a HD video in a compressed format to my netbook running on a Sprint 3G modem. The claimed compression is of a 6.5 Mb/s stream. (It’s claimed to work as though you had 3x more bandwidth).

9:20 AM – Range MAX DualBand Wireless N Router. Best of CES of 2009 has received a refresh for this year with Netgear’s “Bridge Experience.” This new technology offers 4×4 wireless N MIMO along with 1080P streaming capabilities that will cover a 3000sq ft home with ease. This new product will be offered in the spring.

Refresh to update!

Earlier this year during the Consumer Electronics Show, Netgear announced their new Storage Central Turbo (SC101T). Although it only reached store shelves a few months ago, this is still the newest version of Netgear’s bestselling Storage Area Network (SAN). The SC101T is much faster and much more versatile than its predecessor, allowing for multiple users to access data simultaneously and even protecting music, photos and videos.

The Upload Test:
The SC101T is a great Storage Area Network (SAN) (aka. Network Attached Storage – NAS), providing gigabit speeds. When coupled with a gigabit router, can offer fast backups and data access for networked machines. In addition to allowing 2 SATA hard drives, of any size, to be combined, the SC101T offers amazing upload speeds. After running a quick test, my results showed that it only took approximately 3.5 minutes to upload a 4.5GB file through my gigabit connection versus the 8.5 minutes it took using a standard 10/100 Ethernet connection.

The Throughput Stress Test:
To further test how well Netgear’s Storage Central Turbo would perform, we connected the unit to three wired computers through a gigabit connection and a single wireless media streaming device. After loading up large separate video files on all the units at the same time, our computers and media streaming device continued to receive the data seamlessly. Despite so much data flowing through, the video continued to play without any staggering, delays, or hiccups. It was quite impressive compared to the previous generation of NAS devices.

Setup Utility:
The Storage Central comes with the Storage Central Manager Utility, which is required to be installed on our machines to be able to access the drive or make any administrative modifications. This was one of the main pitfalls to Netgear’s product since the user-interface wasn’t too friendly (still usable). One thing that made us give this a thumbs up was that fact that the drive combinations didn’t need to match and it even supported a RAID configuration.

We highly recommend this to anyone who has multiple machines on a network and manages a lot of media. It is extremely worth the investment to backup your data instead of having to spend a few thousand dollars and go through a long and tedious process to have your data recovered if your Hard Drives fail. For just $150, Netgear’s Storage Central Turbo (SC101T) is well worth the money. This of course doesn’t include any hard drives, but it won’t be too expensive as prices are continuously dropping. A 500GB 7200RPM SATA hard drive costs just $130 now. If this “solution” is too expensive, we recommend just purchasing an external hard drive to backup your important documents. It isn’t worth the pain of loosing years worth of data because of something as simple as a power surge.

Buy Now: Netgear Storage Central Turbo – $143 (No Tax & Free Shipping)
Links: Netgear (SC101T) More Info