Maxtor's Shared Storage Plus ups the multimedia NAS ante
posted August 31st 2005 9:20AM
Looks like Maxtor's the latest to try their hand at blurring the line between home NAS (network attached storage) with multimedia capabilities, and set-top digital multimedia box—well, kind of. Their new Shared Storage Plus series of devices due this October will not only offer capacities up to that 500GB sweet spot, but have integrated media-server functionality to UPnP devices on the network, and even a couple USB ports for sharing printers or additional non-networked external hard drives. So yes, you'll have to keep streaming that content to other devices, but it should a little more seamless than rocking those damned UNC drive shares. The 10/100 port might also be a little disappointing for that maximum of 20 users connectible to the drive, but if you need more throughput you should probably be using a drive array anyway.
eh, boxes like this are always too expensive. For the price of 500GB of storage with the pretty useless UPnP stuff you could buy a small box to stick under your stairs or wherever and fill it with a 1.5TB RAID5 on gigabit.
NAS stopped making sense a long time ago. Right now the only advantage of it is for large companies where real estate is more important than anything. In your house, you probably don't need a RAID to fit into 1U enclosure. And that is ALL you're paying for. I built a 750GB (usable) RAID-5 array out of a $100 RAID controller and 4x 250GB drives for about $500 (I waited around for a good deal on hard drives, obviously) 6 months ago. There's no reason to spend a ridiculous amount on these packages solutions. Spend an afternoon doing some very simply setup, then stick it in a corner and forget about it.
But it's Maxtor! Their drives are unfortunately appalling (2 out of the 3 Maxtor drives I own have failed within 6 months of buying them).
And you can build alternatives to this very cheaply and using more realiable drives.
The only thing not simple to reproduce is the media server stuff... but correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't their Linux projects that fulfil that too?
Yeah Maxtor external drives are crap. Mine conked out completely after 6 months... even after formatting, it won't work.
Look at the user opinions for them on CNET, about 70% of the people had problems. That's NOT and acceptable failure rate for a hard drive.
http://reviews.cnet.com/Maxtor_OneTouch_II__300GB_/4852-3186_7-31121421.html?tag=tab
How's this so great? The Buffalo Terastation has 1.6TB and also built-in uPNP server and Gigabit ethernet. Oh, and it came out a few months ago.
As for "Build yourself is cheaper"... well, that's assuming you already have a server. If you also have to buy a case, mobo, P/S, CPU, RAM etc... it's very very hard to beat these. And you have about 100x the hassle.
My external maxtor drive rocks for 4 over years now! Personal experience doesn't count.
Otakucode - you built it for 500 bucks? So, you didn't just use a standard MB/CPU/Case combo, then. What enclosure did you use? I'm curious, because I'd like to build one for something around that price point, as well, without having to shell out the money for a large case, powersupply and MB/CPU that I'll almost never use. What OS does yours run?
Thanks
This is cool. I own several Maxtor drives and I love them. I admit that i'm not the most techical person, but they go that extra mile to make installation simple, so why would I want to go build one from scratch? 500 bucks for 500gigs, come on - that's a steal. it's about a dollar a GB.
I'd rather drop a few bucks on a NAS box, than build a box that I then have to keep patched and updated and so forth. Not to mention the additional power requirements and noise of running a full-fledged computer.
Biggest problem I see is that the current Shared Storage drives don't support Mac clients. If that is still the case, no sale to me, thank you very much.
modmas - How many people have a Maxtor external drive that works perfectly, and don't even know the CNet user opinion forum exists? Of course the people with problems will outnumber the people without.
I think this thing looks neat. I don't want another computer that I have to deal with. I don't have (or want) a 1U rack. I can stick this next to my printer.
I have a simple home setup with a couple computers. This looks like as easy and simple way to get backup and media serving in one box.
You can argue it is pricey. You can argue reliablilty (I have had good luck with Maxtor but terrible luck with Western Digital). But the product itself seems like an easy way to get some good functionality. If you like to "roll your own", that is cool but don't discount that many just want simplicity at this point.
If this drive is as simple as my current OneTouch, I'm sold!
This Maxtor NAS is almost what I've been waiting for. Can you flip the drive in it to a WD. I use a Synology disk station myself because its small enough to put beside the mini-switch and cable modem on network shelf in the basement. Plus, I think it uses about 17W vs. the min. 150W+ needed to keep a server box humming. I've been waiting for a network DVR/media player that will access UNC shares and the only thing close is the UPnP stuff like DLink's Medialounge. Liteon had the perfect product with their LVD-2010, but they shelfed it in north america. I won't say why in case big brother is scanning keywords but imagine, the thing would play .ISO files.