XIMETA NetDisk 80GB Hard Drive ( NDU10-80 )

Rating:
Summary: Works great.
Review: I have the model which is blue. Same model number as this one, but I am not sure if they are exactly the same. With this one, it works great with XP, just plug it into an ethernet port on your network hub and it shows up as another hard drive on your PC. The only complaints I have is that it gets hot, so I like to turn it off when not in use, but there is no on/off switch so I have to unplug the power source.

Rating:
Summary: Very good product
Review: I've been very pleased with my Ximeta 80 gig external drive. I have it hooked up to my home network so both my wife and I can access files from the Ximeta from different computers. The setup was pretty straight forward, just plug it into your switch and install the drivers on each pc. I have both Mac and Windows PC's on the network so I partitioned the drive through windows with one partition setup with NTFS at 45.2 gigs and the other partition set with FAT32 for my Mac at 30 gigs. I set the smaller partition as FAT32 so that both the Mac and windows pc's could access it. You could set the Mac partition as a mac file system but FAT32 allows both systems to work.

All of my pc's are connected via wireless and there is some capacity issues with that. When you are saving files it can take up a lot of the bandwidth of your 802.11b network so Ximeta recommends 802.11a or 802.11g for the 54mb wireless. I've only seen the issue on the Mac when trying to transfer a lot of photo files, when all the bandwidth was taken up the drive connection was lost. If you are transfering a lot of files you should upgrade to 802.11g or just connect to the switch via ethernet cable and do the transfer from there.

All in all this is a great product. Why buy a usb only external drive when you can have this and share it on your network. The drive also can be a single usb external drive but the real value is in the network feature of the drive.

Rating:
Summary: Good product.
Review: This is very interesting and well built product. In some of the reviews here and on the net, there are some discrepancies. Ximeta has obviously revised the product, for one if you have only windows 2K or windows XP machines, they can all read and write simultaneously, not one at a time. Also there are no dip switches on mine, it automatically decides weather you want to use the USB or the ethernet. and the last thing, there is a power switch on the back in place of the dip switches. I originally bought it thinking that it had these limitations and was pleasantly surprised when it arrived with all the minor bugs worked out. Way to go Ximeta, they obviously took the feedback that was given to them and made a good product even better. Its still not perfect, nothing is, but its close.