Hey Everybody, it's Lon Seidman and we're taking a look today at the LIMA Ultra.
This is a rather unique Network Attached Storage Device
Primarily because it doesn't come with any storage. You have to bring your own.
So the way it works is it has a Gigabit Ethernet connection on one end you plug into your router
On the other end you plug in a USB Hard Drive.
So you've got this Solid State drive in a external enclosure that we're going to be connecting up.
It supports USB 3 so you can get some decent speeds out of it.
Uh, the price on this though is $129.00, which costs as much as a full featured Network Attached Storage device with a Hard Drive
So you have to make your own decision as you watch this review to determine whether or not this might be worth your investment
Now I do want to mention in the interest of full disclosure this came in free of charge from Lima
now for the opinions you are about to hear are my own
no one is paying for this review, and no one is reviewing this content before it is posted.
Now this is a second generation product from Lima
They have another one out with a slower ethernet port, a much slower USB port and a much slower processor than what you're going to find in this one
the original sells for $99.00
That one began life as a Kickstarter
and they had a very rocky start
in that they raised a lot of money, about $1.2 Million dollars
and they had more than 12,000 backers on that project
but it took them almost 2 years to get the hardware out to the people that backed it initially and
a lot of these folks are still upset about what they ended up with
especially now that there is a new and improved product that is much much better than the original
I can see why they are upset, and rightfully so
This was not a good start for a Start-Up
and I think probably things got away from them a little bit.
Although it looks like they're trying to correct that with this new product
and I hope the existing Kickstarter backers will be given some recognition for their contribution and their patience
because, given what I know about the other product this one is going to be a lot better
Although still far from perfect
so, very simple device though
All you gotta do is plug power into it
were going to connect up my hard drive
and my network to it now
and I'm going to get this thing up on my network and Im going to show you how it works.
alright so we are up and running my Lima
is connected to an external hard drive
and of course we've got the gigabit
ethernet going back to the internet so
we are now connected up on my Mac
desktop here and you can see that i have
a Lima folder accessible to me
now one of the important things to note
with this is that unlike other network
attached storage devices that when you
have them plugged into your local
network all of your computers can see
them without software Lima requires
software to be running on the computer
whether it's mac or windows and I think
there's a linux beta also that software
have to be running in the background at
all times for you to be able to access
your Lima file so I've got it running up
here my taskbar it doesn't use all that
much ran about 120 megabytes or so funny
to say only 120 megabytes in
2017 but that is not a lot of memory if
you have four or eight gigs of ram on
your computer but nonetheless to access
your files at any time even if you're
offline
you still need to have this Lima
software running here in the background
kind of similar to what you might
experience with dropbox and other cloud
services and you're going to be a notice
here that my computer is running low on
disk space and I'm gonna pop into the
Lima preferences to show you what that
means so the Lima itself as you can see
has two-and-a-half gigabytes of 240
gigabytes use we have plenty of unused
space available to us but this requires
some degree of local storage for it to
work but we go over here to settings and over
to advance you can see that by default
the caching that lima requires will
take up to ten percent of my free disk
space and right now I've got about 13
megabytes I used up by that cache you can
always clear it out just by clicking the
clear button here or you can set a hard
limit to that amount but it will always
be storing things in the background that
it uses to gain access to things a
little faster what's interesting though
is that it doesn't always use the cache
to access files offline even if they
might be stored in it so you have to
actually do an extra step to ensure that
your files are offline if you're getting
on a plane or something like that and
I'll show you that here in just a second
so we're going to do though is just
close out of this menu real quick
there's much more to see on that i'm
going to take a file that is on my
folder here on my main computer and copy
it over to my Lima here so I'm just gonna
say test and make a new folder and then
I'm going to grab this video file and just
move it out of LON.TV directory and
copy it over to the Lima, now you so how
quickly that 42 megabyte file was
transferred
that's because it was transferred into
the cache it didn't actually get to
the Lima yet it stores it locally in
that cash and then it sinks it up at
time goes on usually goes pretty quickly
especially when you're on
your local network but there is an
intermediary step and those files are
going to be stored on your local
computer first before they are synced
up with the Lima and accessible to other
devices on your network but you can see
here i can play that video file back
here without any issue and we are good
to go and be we should be able to look
at that on other devices now if I want
to make this available offline when i'm
on a plane of something I have to go
here and select keep offline version and
what that will do is copy it
essentially into the computer here
locally so that i can use it while I am
offline but that software of course
still has to be up and running so just
some things to keep in mind it will
require some resident software and it
will be doing some things in the
background and it will take up some of
your disk space to use it because of
that caching issue were not able to do a
real proper speed set but we will do the
next best thing which is trying to get
one of my blu-ray MKV files very high
bitrate HD video to play over the
network. So our macbook air here is
connected via ethernet on Thunderbolt
dock over here then we've got the Lima
next to it also connected to the network
via ethernet I've got a blu-ray MKV here
of one of my daughter's videos here will
start playing it now i should note when
I was testing this earlier this crashed the
Lima so there is still some instability
here with the product and it's early
days here so it's not going to be a
perfect experience for you once again
it's a lot of layers going on here with
the software running here and the Lima
itself that I create more complexity
that might lead itself to sometimes
having crashes and whatnot but it does
seem when it doesn't crash to work
pretty well and can support one of these
blu-ray movies which the prior version
of the product could not do unless you
first copy that huge file onto your
local cache there is some improvement in
speed here at least from what I've been
reading on the old product and when it
is up and running you can do things like
high bitrate video without a problem
now i should note though that if you are
away from home you would not be able to
stream a file like this because it
doesn't do any kind of video transcoding
so that's something we're having a Plex
server which we've talked about a lot
here on the channel might be a good
solution to be able to convert that
video with something smaller so you can
access it elsewhere it's possible that
you could probably access the Lima here
via Plex but I don't know if that's
something you want to do and that might
be a better option for a network
attached storage device that would say
if you are playing to watch movies
away from home either load them up into
an offline folder on your device first
or use smaller movies that won't take
as much data on the upstream to get to
you wherever you are
alright let's take a look now at the
mobile app this is running on my iphone
but there's also an android version that
performs very similarly to this one
however on the android version you'll
see a little plus icon in the lower
right hand corner that will allow you to
upload whatever file you want right now
in iOS they don't have an upload button
in the app so you can't select photos that
you want to upload or videos from your
Photo Roll like you can do on many other
cloud applications just yet
you can upload the entire thing but not
one photo or one video hopefully they'll
be adding that that's one of the
problems when you review products like
I do, especially early in their life
cycle you don't get all the features
just yet so at some point will probably
add that functionality to IOS, but right now
if you're on Android have a lot more
flexibility as to what you can upload
and gain access to as a result but once
the files are uploaded on a desktop
computer for example you do have access
to them so for example that folder we
created the second ago with our test
video is in there so we can get it that
they also did a pretty cool thing with
the movies folder here so if you look
down the lower right-hand corner there's
a little icon for movies and if I hit
that it actually found the metadata for
that frozen video we watched earlier and
I can click on that and i watch that MKV
on my phone but note that this is not
going to be doing any conversion like
you might see on flex or something so if
you're on a remote network on your LTE
network somewhere out of your home
you're not going to be able to watch the
movie all that easily but it does seem
to work on mobile here pretty well when
you've got the bandwidth to support
larger files like that and the video
playback app also supports chromecast
you have the ability to toss it over to
a TV if you wish. I mentioned before you
can't add photos from your iphone but
you can if you're in an email
application, send documents over. So I've got
a PDF here and upcoming board of
education meeting i'm going to i just
click on the upload button and go to
import with Lima. What that will do is
pull up Lima extension here and i can
decide where I want to put that maybe
I'll stick it on the desktop folder here
and hit the choose folder and that will
copy that file over
after I click save a lot of steps involved
with it but the file does get over there
and if i go back to my Lima app and we
go over to the desktop here you can see
that file is available and right now it
is currently uploading that file from my
phone over to the Lima on the network
here but again because it uses that
local cash i can access it immediately
and then once it gets into that box I
can access it on my computers and other
devices now let's get into some of the
techie stuff here so we've got the Lima
of course using an external hard drive
that is plugged into a USB and I one of
the first things that was wondering is
what happens to the hard drive when you
plug it in and surprisingly it doesn't
format the drive and this drive is
actually formatted for my mac and it
just worked with it was no format
involve didn't lose any of the data that
we currently on the drive
however all the data on the drive is
invisible to the Lima creates its own
folder so then I thought well if that's
the case maybe I can take the drive out
and copy it over to my computer and see
what those files look like we're going
to do here is just go over to my
computer and hit the eject button here
and that will safely disconnect the
drive from our lima and when that is
done i will take it out of Lima and we will
pop it into the computer so you can see
now it says that my lima is disabled
because the hard drive was ejected i'm
going to now I take the drive out of the
Lima here and plug it into my mac and
we're going to see what we can find on
there
alright so I've got my drive plugged
into my mac here it's still showing up
as a mac drive in fact i have a file
that i placed on the drive before i even
connected it to the Lima because I was
curious to see what would happen to it
that file is still accessible to the
computer but that image is not
accessible to the Lima because we didn't
load it in through its software you're
going to notice on here I have some
hidden files now on the mac by default
these things will not display but i
reconfigured my mac to show me things
and everything that Lima is is contained
in this lima folders you can see we've
got about a two-and-a-half gigabytes
worth of data stored in that folder and
the problem though is that when you go
into that folder you don't have access
to your stuff on your computer because
it is all encrypted that is often a good
thing to prevent people you don't want
to get your data getting it but it also
means you
can't get it either when it's on your
computer so we scroll through all this
stuff here you can see the bunch of
gibberish and a bunch of crazy folders
and there is one file up here somewhere
there we go that is about two-and-a-half
gigs about 2.2 four gigabytes that I
believe is our blu-ray MKV file that i
loaded on yesterday to test I can't play
it back because it is all encrypted but
that is how it stores its data
the other problem is that you can't back
this up and let you do some kind of
backup on your computer to get those
files out because everything is
encrypted here if you copy that folder
over to another drive, I tried it earlier
the Lima won't recognize it so it only
pairs up with the drive that you
initially connected to it with if you
have any kind of dr corruption your data
is gone
you need to come up with a way of
backing this up with your computer
otherwise you're going to be relying on
a single drive's reliability for your
data so as a back tool this is probably not
recommended however what they did tell
me is that you bought a second Lima even
the prior generation Lima and set it up
somewhere in your home or over the
Internet those Limas we'll keep each
other in sync but now you're doubling
the cost when you're having to buy
another hard drives this is really
starting to stack up to be an expensive
kind of proposition where as many NAS
devices have some backup functionality
built into them where you can at least
connect an external hard drive to it and
backup your data to that on the Lima
your options are very limited here
because this drive is not readable to
anything unless you plug it in to the
Lima and access it through its software
now Lima does have a product roadmap
on their website that details a lot of
the features that they hope to add to
the product over the next several weeks
and months but really a lot of this
stuff is already on other consumer
network-attached storage devices you're
not gaining all that much here and the
one feature that could have made this
thing a killer device is the one that
they didn't implement because they
created this whole complicated bonding
essentially of the external hard drive
to the Lima which is it would have been
great to have been able to load up a
whole bunch of data via the USB cable on
my computer very very rapidly
maybe in five or ten minutes to load
several terabytes of data onto one of
these efforts being for example plug it
into the Lima and then turn it into a
network attached storage device but
unfortunately the way they engineered
this thing it doesn't work like that you
still have to push everything through
the network and with most consumers on
wireless connections this is a big
source of frustration for many many
users of network attached storage they
can't believe how long it takes to get
the data loaded onto to 'em and this would have
solve that problem and cut down that
data low time substantially and done in
a way that I think a lot of consumers
understand take the external hard drive
out plug it into your computer move the
files over, unplug it, plug it into Lima and off
you go now there is a feature that they
are promising to add very shortly to the
product that claims to do that import a
large amount of files to Lima rapidly
and it looks like it would allow the
computer to you know work with the
encryption on the drive to get that data
over to it and it's expected very
shortly so I did click on the following
link here and i will get an email
notification when it's implemented
because i think that could be the
game-changer for this is cutting down
that transfer time but if they don't
solve the problem of being able to
backup the data very easily without
having to buy another lima I think we're
still going to be back where we started
from because right now at this drive
fails or this Lima fails, your data is
gone and that's not an acceptable
solution here for many consumers I
really think they need to come up with a
way that you can more easily transport
data back and forth between drives
without having to buy another lima to
have automated backup put together
because it's kind of pointless to buy
one of these expensive devices and then
not have some kind of automated backup
solution because that is a standard
feature across-the-board even on
low-cost NAS devices right now so we're
going to keep an eye on this, we're gonna come
back to it but right now it's not
something that i can recommend in its
current form but maybe when some of
these rapid loading features are added
we'll take a second look.
This is Lon Seidman thanks for watching.
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