Emprex NSD-100 P2P Download Engine

Verdict: This sub-£50 box might download Bit Torrents, but not with much grace.

While good things can come in small packages, more often than not a reasonable price is the trump card. To this end the Emprex NSD-100 doesn't disappoint. While it’s neatly proportioned – roughly the size of two decks of cards lying side by side – 46 notes isn’t a huge amount of money for something the purports to do so much.
The headline feature is the handling of Bit Torrent downloads to an external hard disk (not included), so you can power down your noisy PC overnight and still get all your legally downloaded music and video in the morning. To that, the NSD-100 adds simple but effective 'share-mapping' of drives connected to it; releasing files over your LAN like a NAS does, and setting up an ftp server or printer sharing.
The setup's fairly straightforward for anyone who knows their DHCP from their PPOE and knows where to find their TCP/IP settings. Once we’d plugged the NSD-100 into our router and powered it up, we only had to run the quick setup wizard to see the blinking lights of life from the box.
This wizard might have a strictly 'less is more' UI, but does everything it needs to reasonably well. The User Guide isn’t ideal for the inexperienced though, as it’s best described as providing broken and clumsily translated English. A bit of perseverance with the Wizard should see you through, though.
Once setup, you can now access the NSD-100 via its web interface, and its’ plain sailing from here on in. You can format your external hard disk to FAT32 (the NSD-100 insisted, but remember that FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit) and set up user permissions, shared drives and public and admin folders.
Share mapping is a useful feature as it gives each user of the NSD-100 a folder on the external hard disk and maps this folder to their PC as a network drive, just as a NAS would let you do.
The 'Access via web' button of the web interface is where you can set up your Bit Torrents. Once there, you’re presented with a straight forward and unexceptional layout. Setting up Bit Torrents is fiddly though. The NSD-100 can handle 20 streams at once, but it can only handle four of those being active and you need to attach each torrent to the NSD one by one.
You can give the device 20 jobs, but 16 will sit idly and refuse to start until you manually tell them to. This wasn't exactly what we had in mind. Worse, you can’t access the NSD-100 remotely, so you can’t set active idle Bit Torrents unless you’re at home, or suck files from the NSD-100 over the internet.
CONCLUSION That final arrangement, sums up the NSD-100 perfectly: It works, but feels somewhat lacking. It can indeed provide torrent downloading by itself, among other things, yet it does it without much grace. That there’s no integrated storage, makes £46 seem a little steep.
The Asus WL-700gE packs in 250GB of storage and is a much neater and more polished box to handle torrents, and it also has an iTunes client and other fun network tools. This box might cost £162 at Scan, but adding a 250GB disk that’s powered entirely by USB (to avoid yet another used socket around your router) costs £90 or so anyway. For neatness and the extra polish, we’d go for the WL-700gE every time.
You can buy the Emprex NSD-100 P2P Download Engine from Scan for £45.81 inc VAT.