Patriot Memory NAS GearBox Mini Adapter Video Review

We often test and review many of the latest high-end NAS systems to come out onto the market and they usually offer impressive RAID performance and loads of features.

What happened, though, when the folks over at Patriot Memory asked if we wanted to do a review of their new NAS GearBox? We knew from the pictures in the press release we weren't expecting a full-on NAS of the normal variety costing well into the four figures, no...we were expecting a tiny little NAS device that could easily sit in the palm of our hands, weigh under one hundred grams and cost around $50 USD.

Patriot Memory's NAS GearBox is a tiny little NAS gadget with 10/100 Ethernet LAN support and it comes with two powered USB 2.0 ports for easily adding and sharing media and files over your network. We were a little skeptical about this device, as we are now starting to see more and more routers come with a USB 2.0 port for simple adding of storage to your network. Some even come with some extra features such as built-in torrent downloaders, for instance. You do pay a price premium for these devices, but still...why should we get excited about this little and seemingly very basic NAS GearBox? Is it really any good?

Let's just start by saying, for $50 USD, you cannot really go wrong, but you do get what you pay for. On the bad side, the device only supports up to 100Mbit LAN transfers and at the best of times with an 8GB SD flash card hooked into the device, we only saw around 8MB/s speeds across our network. However, the device for such a small unit does pack in more than you think. It comes with built-in FTP and print server functionality as well as a torrent downloader. You can access all of these features through the web based interface which is simple, yet powerful enough to have surprised us a little when we got into it and had a look around.

Watch our full video review below as we unbox the product, get a close look at the device and the web based interface and just how it works and performs. Hit the play button below now!