Review: Emprex NSD-100 networking

Emprex's unique NSD-100 automates Bittorrent downloads.

Bittorrent is a way of downloading large files over the internet.

Predominantly these are illegal music and film downloads, but there's also a fair amount of legal content such as copyright-free films or large program files.

To download a file you first download a smaller 'torrent' file from the web, and run this in a Bittorrent program, then leave the PC on and wait for it to download. With the NSD-100, you don't need to leave the PC on.

Instead, plug in a USB hard disk (it must be at least 10GB), load the torrent file using the web interface and set it going. It uses very little power and makes no noise, so you can leave it on overnight and your files will be there in the morning.

Once we got it working, it worked very well, but the installation process was quite painful. The manual is written in poor and absurdly technical English and the web interface wasn't very easy to use. But it did the job well and with little fuss once set up. But then the D-Link DNS-313 does a similar thing, you can insert your own hard disk and it is only £15 more.