Western Digital Essential NetCenter 320GB - NAS Box

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=1762' target='_blank'>http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=1762</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Considering its expertise in hard disk manufacturing it’s no surprise that Western Digital (WD) has taken its high capacity IDE drives and created a low-cost NAS solution for the home user and small business. The Essential NetCenter family consists of three members with the latest model on review delivering a tasty 320GB of networked storage at a price to suit most pockets. At first glance, Freecom’s Classic SL Network Drive looks much better value but it only delivers half as much storage capacity and the NDAS technology it employs can be cumbersome to install. Along with an easier installation, the NetCenter also offers a number of other features that make it more versatile."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/1762-3.jpg" /><br /><br />It has a Fast Ethernet port is located at the rear and partnered by a couple of USB 2.0 ports. The NetCenter is set to receive an IP address via DHCP and comes with software that makes it easy to access. As a simple plug-and-go network storage solution the NetCenter delivers well. However, the method of handling external USB storage devices can be a drawback and printing features are limited. It also does seem a bit expensive at about $535 IMHO.

[Crocuta]

I wish one of these companies would just bite the bullet and pay MS the license fee to use NTFS. For certain types of situations, a Linux formatted disc might not be a bad thing, but for lots of home users, you need that flexibility to plug in your regular external disc, use it freely, then unplug it and take it back to your other computer (say, at work). This one comes the closest of any that I've seen to accomodating other file systems, but it's still a bit of a kludge. All that said, I'm seriously considering this.

Can anyone with one of these tell me if it's possible to have a Windows XP user log into their desktop and have a connection to one of these be automatically enabled as their 'My Documents'? I don't want to (can't afford to) get into a full Windows server, but it would be nice to have each person with their own space that they could reach from either of a couple of computers.