I recently picked up a 4gig NAS drive 'Seagate Personal Cloud' for reasonable money, but I'm writing here to warn off any potential purchasers and to check a couple of things with anyone else who has one.

Generally its a good value NAS type drive seemed to suit my modest needs perfectly, however it took me two days to get up and running - I'd switch it on and log in to it, it would tell me it wanted to update the firmware and then say it couldn't do the installation and fail, I'd factory reset rinse and repeat to no avail. I finally managed to get it to skip the update and it finished configuring itself and then finally the update worked (from within it's own settings panel.

So far so 'OK'

Now, I also run my own DNS server so that I can block advertising and malware at my router, one of the benefits of this is that I can also see all the outgoing requests from the devices on my network (great for trouble shooting and to catch naughty software quickly). Low and behold I can see the NAS making DNS requests every 3 minutes for a bunch of sites:

apple.com
hp.com
microsoft.com
oracle.com
gnu.org

The NAS is hitting these sites over 700 times a day, now I don't much care for any of the dot coms but I'm unhappy to be causing issues for gnu.org.

The icing on the cake is that Seagate Support is utterly atrocious, they've not responded to queries put in through the webform on their website, the have a twitter acct called seagage_support which just told me to phone them, expect their phone support line is open 7 - 4 Mon-Fri and I'm in gainful employment during those times, so currently I'm a bit stuck with this thing.

Does anyone else have one of these things and the ability to monitor what it's doing on your network to see if mine is an isolated incident or if this is a 'feature' ?

If you're thinking of buying one of these may I urge you to reconsider - I'm currently viewing mine as a 'buy cheap buy twice' mistake.