USR Secure Storage Router 8200 reviewed

AFTER A COUPLE of weeks of e-mail tag, and a couple more weeks of delays, U.S. Robotics shipped me out a Secure Storage Router 8200 to evaluate. It arrived from USR packed in a box full of Wireless-G gizmos, including an access point, PC card, and router, plus a free hat and a couple of press kits. Don't know if I'll ever get to tinkering with the G goodies at this rate, but that's another story...

The SSR 8200 is a little unique for a home broadband router solution since it includes a pair of USB 2.0 ports and a Firewire port to connect disk drives onto the router for shared storage. Setup consisted of simply powering everything off, plugging in the WAN connection, any external drives, Ethernet, then powering everything back up. Once powered up, pop up a web browser to http: to the device and a log-in screen asks you to put in a password for the administrator account. Successful log in brings up a GUI-based Management Console, a slick piece of work that displays a network diagram of all devices plugged into the SSR. There's a log-in timer on the admin account as well, so it'll kick you off if you happen to step away for a bit. Didn't crack a book, didn't load the CD, just read the simple pamphlet and it was a no brainer...

My test setup included the ADS USB 2.0 kit with a 30 GB drive jacked directly into the router plus my HP box as network node on the LAN. Both show up as icons. Clicking on an icon brings up the properties of the connected device, be it WAN connection or disk drive. Set up a new user on the 8200's authorization list, and away we go for moving files from PC to SAN. Don't expect blazing speed, however. It took me about 21 minutes to move 550 MB of pictures from CD to the USB 2.0 hard drive hanging off the SSR, but to be fair, there's some Internet overhead going on as I surf the web. Nor is a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet connection with Ethernet overhead going to be as fast as a 480 Mbps USB 2.0 or a 400 Mbps Firewire port.

The 8200s on-board firewall comes up locked up; a user has to turn settings off before allowing traffic inbound or outbound (with the exception of default outbound Telnet, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, IMAP, POP3 and SMTP). It can also be configured for - but warns against -remote administration. An on-board security log keeps running track of all processes started, times they started, and the like. It also runs out and gets an NTP network time sync to time-stamp log entries. Another interesting feature allows one to block web sites at the router level. The underlying operating system is Linux; I am not sure what chip they have driving the device and am too tired to take a screwdriver to the case to find out.

Other hidden goodies include a VPN tunneling, automatic firmware upgrading, PPTP, IPSec, a local FTP server, and MAC Cloning. There's a lot of capability packed under the hood of this device and I have only scratched the surface. All the security features are definitely a couple of notches above the basic stuff I have on the Linksys wireless node. Price range on the InterWeb for one is between $250-300, depending on the web site and the day of the week.

If I had to ask Satan Claws for an improved version, I'd want one with 802.11g and gigabit Ethernet glued on top. A wireless-G version is likely in the pipeline. GigE may sound like overkill for a home LAN, but 10/100 Ethernet is the bottlenecking factor when transferring data onto a USB 2.0 or Firewire drive attached to the device. Still, all things being equal, I'm going to be a little sad when I ship the box back to USR. µ