Sheer hell of networking home continued

By Doug Mohney: Monday 14 February 2005, 10:35

ONE ALTERNATIVE not mentioned in last week's column on "The sheer hell of networking your home", here, were disk drives with built-in Ethernet connections. A number of readers wrote in to sing the virtues of solutions from Ximeta (www.ximeta.com) and Buffalo Technology (www.buffalotech.com), with the majority of the e-mail being love letters for the Buffalo Technology gear.

Ximeta was the first company to roll out a drive solution integrating a 10/100 Ethernet connection with an external disk drive, dubbing its technology NDAS – Network Direct Attached Storage – and getting a patent on it. Basically, you jack the drive into your basic hub/router and it appears as a disk drive on your network without having to be assigned an IP address. The company claims max burst data transfer of around 80 Mbps on a Fast Ethernet connection and is licensing its technology to other companies, with Japanese-based Buffalo (Buffalo Technology parent company) releasing a Gigabit Ethernet 160 and 250GB drive packages based on Ximeta NDAS. Alternatively, Ximeta also includes a USB 2.0 port on their drives, so if you are doing some very intensive data moving and don't want to clutter up your home network, just disconnect the Ethernet and plug it into a USB port.

Continues @ The Inquirer