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 Maxtor Shared Storage Drive
200Gb $449, 300Gb $549
www.maxtor.com.au
Portable hard drives are all the rage these days, especially as capacity has increased into the hundreds of gigabytes yet prices have still fallen. Maxtor, along with Seagate, Iomega and others have been releasing a range of drives, but this new model has some pretty cool features.
Maxtor's new drive lets you easily centralise, organise and share data, photos or music on a wired or wireless network. While the drive has no wireless capabilities built in, you can easily make it a wireless drive (with password protection) by plugging a wireless access point into the unit, letting anyone on your network access the drive – hence the need for password protection.
Interestingly, to plug it into your computer network, you plug it in via an Ethernet port on your broadband router, instead of plugging the drive into a USB port on your computer. As previously mentioned, you can plug a wireless access point into the Ethernet socket for wireless access.
Now that it's plugged in via Ethernet, users now have easy access to a shared public folder and a set of password protected personal private network folders. A pretty cool and, as far as we're aware, a unique feature, is that files can be easily organised when copied to the drive by simply selecting and dragging files into a special PC desktop icon. This is done with Maxtor's "Drag and Sort" technology which automatically sorts them based on file type and puts them in specific music, photo, video or document folders, and identifies and sorts more than 100 Windows common file types.
There are two USB 2.0 ports on the back of the drive as well, and these support other USB drives and USB printers, letting you have wired or, if you've set it up, wireless printer access across the network.
All-in-all, it's a feature packed portable hard drive, and shows that almost anything can be networked, wired or wirelessly, without the need for a PC to run the show – even your hard drive!
Alex Zaharov-Reutt |
