Hard Drive & Storage - News & Reviews

Maxtor Shared Storage Plus Drive (500GB)

Maxtor Shared Storage Plus Drive (500GB) looks elegant with thin silver body and comes with a grey plastic stands, to make the drive stand vertically. Apart from providing a graceful look to the drive, the thin silver body of the drive provides increased airflow, allowing the unit to run cool to the touch. At the front of the drive is a single button for power switch with a small status light for indication of On/Off. Behind the drive are an AC power jack, Ethernet jack and 2 USB ports.

Connectivity and setup

Setting up the Maxtor Shared Storage Plus Drive (500GB) is very simple. Plug in the power, attach it to your router, browse to the MSHome workgroup under Network Places where it appears, and the drive is ready to use. If you want to use the drive from Windows Explorer just right-click the drive name and assign it a drive letter using the Map Network drive.

You can also tweak the default setting of the drive like changing the workgroup the drive appears under. It can easily be done using Maxtor Manager Utility, or you can check your router’s DHCP table for the drive and surf directly to the onboard HTML setup program using the drive’s URL.

Features:

• Easy to install with automatic network configuration and Maxtor’s unique QuickStart CD that sets up the Shared Storage Drive to look like a local drive on each configured PC.
• Connectivity: Ethernet 10/100, Hi Speed USB
• Compatible with Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP
• Cache 16 MB
• Spindle Speed: 7200 rpm
• Drive Capacity 500GB
• Device Capacity: NAS Server
• The Shared Storage Plus lets you expand its capacity or share additional drives via its two USB ports
• Drag and Sort for automatic file organization
• SimpleView for providing quick backup and storage status to all users and for all networked PCs
• Media Streaming. It’s UPnP (Universal Plug ‘n’ Play) and DLNA compliant (Digital Living Network Alliance) and can stream audio, video, or photos to any PC or UPnP- or DLNA-compatible device, which will display them on your TV or play them over your audio system.

Drawbacks:

• Doesn’t support Gigabit Ethernet.
• A little noisy
• Little bit big and heavy

Comments:

Maxtor Shared Storage Plus Drive (500GB) comes with handsome packaging, has good performance, easy setup, loads of features, and useful software. I like the backup feature. It can backup more than one computer and keep the history. Setting up the drive is extremely simple. The capacity of the drive can be easily expanded via the 2 USB ports the drive features. These USB ports can also be used for network printers. The only drawback the drive has is it doesn’t support Gigabit Ethernet. Media Streaming is another impressive feature the drive has. It allows playing back digital photos, music and video to networked home entertainment systems which is awesome.