Mediasonic SU2LA Dual Bay RAID + NAS Review

Manufacturer Product Page: Mediasonic Web Store
Product Number: HUR1-SU2LA
Availability: Now
Price: Click Here to Compare Prices
Warranty Length: 1 year



You know when a technology is truly matured when you can hear “Jane & Joe Six Pack” talking about “their computer THIS” or “their network THAT”. In the case of networks I here it all the time, average non tech people having and using “their home network”. Do they understand the underlying technology? Of course not, they just know that they plug in the “phone jack looking thingy” and it allows them talk to their other computers. Just recently, home storage and network attached storage has started to enter the average computer user’s lexicon. One thing is for certain: these NAS boxes are not exactly what you think of when you think Network Attached Storage.

In this emerging new market niche it seems that Walmart Rules are in effect and cost truly is paramount. Jane & Joe Six Pack may not exactly know what a NAS does but they certainly know they don’t want to spend a lot of money finding out. To this end most of the value oriented NAS’s are BYOD or Bring Your Own Disk(s) and are either in single bay or dual bay configurations. They are not fancy devices and sheer speed is not a top priority. Yes, they have to be fast enough to stream a movie or song across the network but they don’t have be any faster than that. In the never ending battle of “right sizing”, advanced features like Print Server or even native multi-OS support have been removed, or severely truncated; luckily “right sizing” on most dual bay versions still means RAID is included. The upside to all this down sizing is that these solutions are fast enough, easy enough, stable enough and above all cheap enough for normal everyday people to want to find out what NAS is all about.

Just recently we reviewed two dual bay storage enclosures from MediaSonic. The HUR1-SU2 and the HUR1-SU2FWB and they were found to be very good “no frill” devices that got the job done. During that review we decried the lack of any NAS features on the higher end SU2FWB model and MediaSonic seems to have answered our musings.

Today we will be looking at one of their newest products: the HUR1-SU2LA. This unit is a 2 bay Raid+ NAS Drive Enclosure Kit that not only includes USB connectivity but also RJ45 network abilities. Just like its other siblings it has RAID 0 and 1 capabilities and can use any standard SATA 3.5” hard drive. Also like the other two units it comes with a one-year warranty and will be widely available at various e-tailers throughout the country (can also be purchased directly through the MediaSonic webstore). However, the biggest difference between this unit and its siblings is that this unit is not marketed towards the SOHO customer; rather this unit is more for the first time NAS buyer AKA Consumer Marketplace. Due to this market strategy change we will answer the most important question of them all: will this new and different market focus have a negative or positive impact on this unit's performance?