Ximeta has an interesting external USB 2.0 hard drive that can also be connected directly to a LAN . . . sort of.
Ximeta’s drive is Network Direct Attached Storage, which limits the environments in which it can be used as well as how it can be used.
First, the drive is more-or-less for environments using Windows 2000/XP only. They apparently are working on drivers for Mac/Linux and older versions of Windows, however.
Second, unlike Network Attached Storage, in order to work this drive requires client software to be installed on each machine that is going to use it. That also means no non-PC devices, such as a network-aware MP3 player, can access the hard drive.
Third, the Ximeta drive is restricted such that only one user can have full write access to the drive at a time, and one of the criticisms many reviewers have had is that the software doesn’t have a lot of options for managing this.
So why would anyone (like me) want this? Largely, due to price. Looking around online, I’ve seen these around $250 for a 160 gigabyte version. Contrast this with true NAS drives which tend to be expensive — D-Link has a consumer-level NAS drive that is about $250 for just 20 gigabytes.
I’m going to buy one of these, dump the 40 gigabytes or so worth of photos I’ve got stored on an external drive, so my wife can access that from her wireless laptop without having to swipe my external USB 2.0 HD.
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