e-TRAYz

Latest update on 2010/04/05 - [ News | Comments ]

It was November 26th at around 3pm when the postman rang the office doorbell. I knew it must have been my e-TRAYz somehow but the parcel he was holding under his arms looked too small to hold an e-TRAYz box inside. I was wrong :) the parcel had a little Xtreamer sticker outside so I knew it was what I was waiting for! The e-TRAYz from www.xtreamer.net - check it out.

As a part of the e-TRAYz betatester group, I received it a few weeks before the end customer would get it. I felt delighted but the reason why 30 community members received it so early was of course that we needed to give as much feedback as possibe to shape the e-TRAYz software and make it stable before the customers get their devices.

So, unlike Xtreamer, samples of the e-TRAYz were sent out to people before the official release date. But there was a bad timing issue: Xtreamer owners were eligible to pre-order the e-TRAYz for a special reduced price but they had to decide to do so before November ended and the samples arrived in beta testers' hands in the very last week of November. So there was not really enough time for us to do intensive tests to help customers with their decision to pre-order or not. On top of that, we beta testers had to agree to keep findings confidential and we were only allowed to report bugs to the Xtreamer/e-TRAYz team. Luckily this "rule" was revoked later and we could discuss about the e-TRAYz openly in the Xtreamer Chat.

The first official e-TRAYz units finally arrived at the customers around the second week of December. A few days later a "stable" e-TRAYz software was released. So everything was set! But opinions were divided: some customers expected their e-TRAYz to be a match against their Synologys, QNAPs or <replace this with a 200-400 EUR NAS> but here is some information to make sure you understand the concept of the e-TRAYz.

The e-TRAYz is advertised as a "Personal Storage On the Go". Sure, it sits at home where you connect it to your local network like a usual NAS but it was created to be the perfect companion for your Xtreamer media player AND... for yourself while you are "on tour" and need remote access to the contents on the e-TRAYz. The software promises that you can use the disks just like a normal local hard disk on your remotely used PC, no matter where you are. Of course quality and usability highly depends on your internet connection speed though. The e-TRAYz offers additional features and some of them still need a lot of improvement but if you're looking for a cheap NAS-like solution, the e-TRAYz should be on your candidates list coz originally a NAS is nothing more than a storage attached to the network and this is what the e-TRAYz already is.

In the following review I will write about my experience with the e-TRAYz. If you got any suggestions on what I should test, feel free to leave a comment here or write to me via e-mail: reviews (at) mavvy.net