Just ordered a 500g FreeAgent Go and I'm pretty excited about it. But I really want to find a product that'll let me treat it as a file server on my network rather than having to worry about connecting it directly to my laptop.
This Belkin Network USB Hub seems like it'd fit the bill, and it can also serve as a print server, among other things. Seems like a really nifty product, but apparently it can only serve one computer at a time, so you can't use it like a real file server. I wonder if there's anything else like it that'd let me treat my FreeAgent Go as general NAS.
Update: The Addonics USB NAS adapter (see this extensive review of the product) seems like what I want for just about the price point that I'd hoped for too. However, it requires that the drive be formatted as FAT32, and have a specific directory structure, so it's not perfect, but it seems pretty close to ideal.
Update: There's a more expensive product being released soon called Pogoplug. It does support NTFS and HFS.
Update: Other notable gadgets that you can use with a portable USB drive include the Western Digital TV player and the FreeAgent | Theater (not yet released). My friend has the WD player and says it's great. You just plug in a drive and it'll play pretty much any media format on it on your TV. It's also nice in that it doesn't require a particular kind of USB device, whereas the FreeAgent Theater requires Seagate's own drives.
It's too bad these drives only have one USB port so you can't treat one as your media source for one of those gadgets and a file server at the same time.
Update: (May 25). After using the Addonics NAS adapter for a while now, I give it a thumbs down. It works, but it's flaky. Sometimes it works better once I reboot the adapter, but that's bad news. I have the drive mapped in Windows and if I haven't used the drive recently it freezes Explorer for a while when trying to bring up My Computer before the drive is usable. It's just flaky.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
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