Patriot Gauntlet Node Review - Portable Wireless & Powered @ [H]

Patriot Gantlet Node Review - Portable Wireless & Powered - The Gauntlet Node from Patriot is designed to provide extra storage to mobile users. The ability for any 2.5" HDD or SSD to operate wirelessly as a hot-spot for up to 8 users and to provide a shared data pool is compelling. It does feature support for Android and iOS devices natively. We test the Gauntlet Node to see if it delivers.

Nifty little device for long road trips or overnight stays elsewhere. I really like that they let you pick what size drive to put in it versus cramming a 100MB drive into and making it non-exchangeable.

seems like a great companion for a nexus7

so you'd have to disconnect from any internet you were getting from wifi to use this thing, no?

I like the idea of this but wish it can fit a 12.7mm drive since AFAIK the largest 9.5mm is 1TB and 2TB are still in the 15mm class.

If only we can get to the 2TB size of SDXC.

yes, you connect to the Gauntlet, which becomes a hotspot.

good point ninjaturtle, for the moment we are bound to 1TB.

Great write up. I've been looking for something like this for my smart phones. Would have been nice to see how the device performs in additional real world scenarios such as streaming music\video to Android and iOS devices while on the go. I wonder, if you connect to it as a wi-fi hotspot, does that kill your data connection? If so, might be a deal breaker for me.

I'm a little confused about the comment about having to pass your internet through this device?
"The fact that the Gauntlet Node becomes an intermediary between the user and the router brings the importance of its speed as a wireless pass-through device"

Can’t you just configure the gauntlet as just another device (mac address) on your network; just like any other PC, Server, NAS, Media Server, Network camera, tablet, phone, etc.. By assigning the gauntlet its own dedicated ip, within your workgroup or domain?

Why can’t you just plug in the gauntlet with the usb cable, configure a static ip on the gauntlet, for use on your workgroup/domain, give it a new login pass, remove usb calbe, and then be good to go on wifi?

Then all a user would do is type the gauntlet's ip into windows explorer (or other OS file browser) and then log into the device and transfer or stream their files.
And if the user wishes they can then map the drive.

Why do you even need the internet involved in this process?

If all the devices are on the same workgroup or domain, they will already get their internet from the main modem.

Why would you want another device (the gauntlet in this case) passing the internet through to your pc?

I imagine that's done because mobile devices (Android/iOS) wouldn't be able to access a network drive in typical fashion? I know you can on Android with any decent file explorer but it may not be something every customer can do or they can easily configure, dunno.

Speaking of which, the review seems incomplete without at least a basic once over of the Android/iOS apps, since many would-be buyers will rely mainly on those apps to access this device.

Stoly said:

seems like a great companion for a nexus7

Click to expand...

Decent alternative, though rooting your Nexus 7 and simply using a $1 USB OTG cable + any external drive/reader is far cheaper and functionally identical (except it's not wireless obviously). This kinda thing seems a little more geared towards iOS, although there's an increasing amount of Android devices without expandable storage.

Eventhough I have the 64Gb versions of the iPad, I could easily see this for trips with the kids. Simply store all of the iPad copies of the movies on it and they can easily browse to which ever movie they want to see. I just made an overseas trip and could have used a little extra space as I filled up the entire internal storage and had several seasons of shows I still wanted to take with me.

I'm not entirely sure I would ever use it when connected to the internet so not sure if I would actually care that the drive has to act as a "gateway" or not. One question is how well would this work on the typical hotel network where you have to log in using a passkey and it stores your mac addy? Would there be a way to connect this device up to that type of network?

Hugh - Was the stream test conducted as a media player connecting to a network drive or was the device itself setting up some kind of data stream?

We have another version of this coming with an SSD pre-installed and we are going to do a bit more testing on its streaming abilities from a user aspect with devices attached.