NDAS/Netdisk

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I picked up a new toy last weekend whilst shopping for a portable hard drive enclosure. I happened across Ximeta’s NetDisk product, and fell in love immediately… connects to your LAN or via USB. I’ve found it incredibly handy because it appears as a fixed drive on every computer in my home LAN. It’s also noticeably faster than standard NAS devices. When I head off to work and need my audio production library, I unplug the Ethernet cable and off we go!

I haven’t even scratched the surface: you can bind multiple units into a striped or mirrored array for starters. I’m wondering if anyone else has had experience with this or a similar device, and what you would or could use it for.

Even if you haven’t used one of these yet, ideas and comments welcome!

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Yes, I have had one for several years. It is my FIRST external USB drive. I use it in the USB mode as I did NOT like having to install software where ever I went with it.

Bottom line, if used as a Network drive or a USB drive they are good running machines.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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I didn’t realize this kind of hybrid device had been around for a while, so you just learned me somethin’.

I use the software at home, and USB everywhere else. When I go to work, I just unplug the Ethernet cable, wrap the power cord around it and I’m off to the races. When I get back home, there’s all my stuff, accessible from any computer. It’s a great toy. I could see it becoming a “My Documents” drive, mapping that folder to the device where I use it. Hmmn, there’s another thing to research… how to script reassigning the My Documents folder. It would be slick if I could create a script, click click and wham, My Documents at whatever computer I attach it to (under my profile).

I’m seriously contemplating adding a pair of these with 500GB drives in the future and binding them to make a single 1 terabyte backup system. With gigabit Ethernet, the performance is pretty impressive even on the single drive I have now (a 250). It seems like a feasible backup solution but I have no idea what the performance of a bound system would be. I should look around and see if there are any SATA models, although I suspect the performance difference would be negligible.

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We have USB drives for each of our machines including the laptops. We use them mainly for the “Drive Image” backups, but the ones we have are large enough to also back up some of the data files by just copying them there. We have only the one of NetDisk type.

In addition for my laptop I have a small footprint Seagate 120 GIG that I carry with the computer. It is about 3.5″ x 5″ x 3/4′ thick. Power from the computer by the way of the USB cable.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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