My experience with this product is not pleasing. I purchased this NAS drive from Best Buy May 11, 2009, and it promptly died October 28, 2009. I had over 400 GB of music and movies that I had ripped from my DVD and CD collections.
When it worked, the streaming was relatively slow, partially blame that on my router, but the drive type is not RAID, thusly slower access and slower streaming. The file crawling and ‘caching’ was extremely slow, it took up to 30 minutes for the UPnP or DLNA servers to pick up new files. I would often convert my DVDs to 1GB mp4 videos, and Central Axis had a very hard time streaming it for anything longer than 2 minutes. I eventually would simply copy the video files over to my PS3 and watch them locally from there. If I tried to either read or write to/from Central Axis with more than one computer/peripheral, it would become extremely slow, and sometimes halt. And this was when it was working!
Now that Central Axis has died on me, in less than 6 months from the date of purchase, I am having to figure out ways to pull the data off the drive myself, without voiding warranty of course. Seagate wants $250+ to recover my data. Seriously? And Best Buy, they are useless, their motto is, “After 14 days when we sell it to you, we can’t help you, sorry.”
Listen, I’ll just get to the point. Do NOT buy the Maxtor Central Axis NAS drive. Do NOT purchase products from Seagate, unless you do thorough research before, their service and return policies are aweful! I have to pay to send the defective product back, so they can send me a refurbished model. Seriously?
As a side note: Best Buy employees are morons. Total utter morons. Do not seek their advice, they will likely point you in the wrong direction. And if they have in the past, they got lucky!