To start off, I wouldn’t call this a review of the item cos I didn’t manage to do much testing (or rather I didn’t pay much attention on this hoot) compared with the Synology DiskStation 5-Bay (Diskless) Scalable Network Attached Storage DS1511+ (Black) that I’ve bought around the same period.   I chanced upon this new release by Aztech from the guys at HWZ.   One of the guys, MarineX was given a pair by Aztech to test out the performance and the results where pretty much more stable that the older 280 or the 110EP which I’m using now.

Hence, one fine weekend, I went down to SLS to get the fifth Samsung F4 2TB to complete my 5-disk RAID 5 in my DS1511+.  So I thought i just go around and see how much I can get a pair of the Aztech HL115EP at.  After walking around, it seems that most shops are selling at S$75 a piece.  Some of the staff in some shops don’t even seem to know the price of it and have to check out the POS system.  Maybe it’s really too new. 🙂  I went to back to one of the shops that I frequent and ask the guys there how much they can give me for a pair.  After some ear-to-ear discussion between the sales guy who is helping me and the senior guy behind the cashier, I was told that they lowest they can go is S$70 a piece.  Ok.. not too bad, the saving will go into my carpark and ERP charges 😀

So here it is, a pair of the Aztech HL115EP.  As usual, each box comes with the Homeplug, a UTP cable and the quick start guide and CD.

This version seems to be longer than the HL110EP (200Mbps) model that I’m replacing.  Thickness wise the two models are comparable.  Sorry that I have forgotten to take some of these comparison pictures but I’m too lazy to tear apart my new setup to do the comparison. 😀

The new pair of the HL115EP pairs immediately to the Homeplug network I have at home without the need to even touch the quick connect buttons.  Once confirming the pairing is ok, I remove my existing HL110EP and replace them with the new HL115EP.  I didnt bother to do any transfer rate testing but using a simple copy of a 1GB file from my NAS to the PC i’m using now, I’m getting a copying rate of around 5 to 5.5MB/s, slightly better than the 3.5 to 4MB/s that I’m getting on the HL110EP pair.  Maybe the bottle neck is really in the electrical cabling in my house.  However, to verify this, I would need to dig through my renovation plans to see which are the points that are original by the developer and use those points to test the performance again.

While writing this mini-review, the HL115EP pair has been running 24×7 for the past 3 weeks.  So far, I’ve not seen any disconnection from them and their transfer rates has been quite stable.  Also, working with my HL110EW, the connections have also been pretty stable without any disconnection detected.

In a layman’s conclusion, I would say that if you are looking out for a pair of homeplugs, the HL115EP is a good candidate to be considered among others from TrendNet and TPLink.  However, if you are on HL110 series, I would say that unless you very sure that the new pair will bring about tremendous improvement to your netup, it would good to save the $$ and stick to the HL110 for the time being.  One more thing I’m keeping my fingers crossed is the firmware and support of the HL115EP.  Hopefully Aztech can get their act together and make sure that the HL115EP is stable and able to deliver the punch in the homeplug market as hoped.

For more details on the network performance test results, please see the testing and results by MarineX in HWZ.