Lindy Dual HDD NAS Personal Server Pro review

Despite its low price of just £100, Lindy’s Personal Server Pro NAS enclosure can accommodate up to two SATA hard disks and supports both RAID 0 and RAID 1.

Unfortunately, the Pro was by far the slowest NAS in all our file-transfer tests, no matter which RAID configuration we chose. The main reason for the poor performance is that it’s the only device here with a 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet port instead of the faster Gigabit connection.

We were also disappointed by how fiddly and time consuming it was to fit a hard disk. Unscrewing the side panel and lowering a hard disk into the holding bracket isn’t difficult, but screwing it into place requires a steady hand. You’ll also have to take care to keep track of the numerous screws to prevent them getting mixed up.

The web configuration interface is divided into basic and advanced tabs. The basic tab contains controls for creating user accounts and shared folders, while other commands such as RAID configuration are located in the advanced tab. Creating user accounts, organising them into groups and assigning quotas so that a user can’t use all the available disk space is straightforward. Disks can be formatted as either FAT32 or ext3, but if you want to use RAID, you have to use ext3.

Lindy claims that the Pro can be used to share a USB printer across a network, but it refused to recognise our Samsung laser printer and Epson inkjet printer. It also refused to work as an iTunes music server. It can’t be used as a UPnP media server, although a DVD movie stored on the Pro played back smoothly on a PC using Windows File Sharing.

We were excited by the prospect of an inexpensive RAID-capable NAS, but Lindy has cut too many corners with the Personal Server Pro. Installing disks is time consuming, and its slow file-transfer speeds are especially frustrating as its one-disk counterpart, Lindy’s Personal Server Premium, has a Gigabit Ethernet port and was much faster in our tests.