The WL-700gE is quite a compact little unit, at just 24.1cm wide x 16.1cm deep x 4.5cm high, when laying flat on its rubber feet. At these dimensions, it’s just a bit bulkier than a standard USB enclosure for a 3.5” hard drive. With the option for vertical mounting, it can be positioned to take up hardly any desk space at all. With the pre-installed hard drive, it weighs in at a mere 1.4kg.
The front panel features all the power/activity LED’s for the unit, hard drive, LAN/WAN and wireless LAN ports. The LED status indicates what activity is occurring – no LED means no connection, steady LED shows connection, and flashing LED means activity. There are two buttons on the front – Power and Copy. “Power” turns on the system and mounts the hard drive, while “Copy” will transfer data from a connected USB storage device (like a hard drive or flash drive) to the internal hard drive.
The back panel sports the AC-in jack, the Reset button (hold for ten seconds to return to factory defaults), two USB 2.0 ports (three ports in total), one RJ-45 WAN port, four RJ-45 LAN ports (4-port switch), the wireless antenna jack, and the EZSetup button, which is used to launch the EZSetup application.
The back panel also features two slide-lock tabs which release the top of the unit to allow internal access. With the top open, you can see that the whole system is housed in a metal casing – all ports and jacks run straight into it. The hard drive is mounted in the middle of the housing, slightly offset to the left (looking at the back panel) and is concealed by a metallic cover which can be released with a small thumb screw.
Once off, the drive itself is revealed, and it’s a 164GB Hitachi Deskstar 7200rpm IDE drive. The drive isn’t physically secured to the case any further, so it slides out quite easily. Upgrading the drive is actually fairly simple. The operating system is embedded into the firmware, so replacing the drive with a larger one and then reflashing the firmware will prepare and initialise the drive. This will erase everything on the drive, and you’re still limited to IDE drives, but it’s still a straightforward process. Needless to say, this will void your warranty.
The box comes packaged with the unit itself, wireless antenna, three power cables for different power connections, software CD and the manual.
