It's something more than a USB drive, something less than network
attached storage, but may be perfect in my office, which only has
machines with USB 1 cards (and worse, Win NT machines tha won't even
use the old USB ports).
I'm wondering how easy it is to set up and where I hook it up. I want
to batch copy stuff down from the network and down onto the drive, but
I can't really screw around with the network and I don't want to bug
my IT guys too much.
I bought one a while back, then returned it. The plan was to use it
as a shared network resource for TI7 images and MP3 files.
At the time, they didn't have the shared-write drivers available.
Taking write privileges from a system that no one was sitting at
required me to get up and go there physically - holy sneakernet! The
new shared-write drivers are available now, so I may give them another
try. I'd recommend you read the FAQs at their site, as they talk
about some of the issues.
It was easy to hook up, and should connect to any open port on a
switch or router. Reformatting over the enet was very slow; going
over USB would be a better bet.
There were a few other problems. After copying MP3 files from one PC,
they didn't show up right away on another PC's mapping. I had to
disconnect, then reconnect the drive (in Ximeta's control panel) from
the client PC before they'd show. It wasn't clear to me why this
worked sometimes and not others.
Also, the drivers are proprietary, and it's likely not well supported
as a network drive from imaging boot disks like TI7 or Ghost. I
didn't test this, though.
If you need write permissions from multiple PCs at once, make sure the
new multi-write drivers support all your OS', as they're more limited
than the older single-write-permission drivers. For
single-write-permission, multi-read, the older drivers are a good bit
more mature.
I'm also thinking about trying the Linkstation from
www.buffalotech.com. It has the plus of letting you add extra network
storage by way of their USB port, and is just a bit more $$ than the
Ximeta. Not much info out there, though.
