The Linksys EFG120 has the dubious distinction of being larger than some PCs we've seen. But the unit has two removable 3.5-inch drive bays, each lockable, so you can expand the amount of storage easily. The version we tested was equipped with a single 120GB drive.

The EFG120 is a small-office file and print server. It can be your DHCP server, and it has a comprehensive Web-based utility for management. The administrator can set up accounts, and individual users can change their passwords. Users can have private areas, and you can also allocate public areas; failed attempts to log on can default to these public areas if you choose. You can define groups and enroll users in them; the two default groups, Everyone and Administrators, cannot be deleted. Our experience with Linksys servers suggests that you should ensure the Everyone group does not have root access privileges. The EFG120 will also alert the administrator via e-mail if it has a problem requiring attention.

You can configure the EFG120 to back itself up to a second hard drive, if you install one. It supports UDMA drives with throughputs of 33 to 66 megabits per second. There is no RAID option.

As you can probably tell by now, the EFG120 houses a moderately complete network operating system. The overhead, coupled with a not-very-speedy embedded processor and the 100-Mbps maximum throughput of an Ethernet connection to your users, made it the slowest machine on our tests. We should point out, however, that the 22- to 40-Mbps rates that we measured are sufficient for office tasks. We would not have any qualms about using the EFG120 in an environment where we needed easily configured storage to be shared by a workgroup.

The print server, however, is limited to a single parallel-port printer; we were surprised not to see a couple of USB ports on the back. For the amount of function and storage, we think that the EFG120 is on the pricey side.