Tools Of The Trade: The Ximeta NetDisk Office storage system

Cheaper hard disk technology - along with the mushrooming storage needs of consumers and businesses - is prompting technology firms to come up with innovative storage hardware.

Cheaper hard disk technology - along with the mushrooming storage needs of consumers and businesses - is prompting technology firms to come up with innovative storage hardware.

Plenty of companies are offering add-on hard drives that run over USB or Firewire connections, but the most interesting devices are those that work on a network. Ximeta's NetDisk Office is a good example of this - a neatly designed, 250-gigabyte hard drive with a USB connector and eight Ethernet ports built in.

The idea is that home users or small work groups can just plug in the device and add extra storage. But like most things technological, the reality is less simple.

As a USB hard drive, the NetDisk Office works pretty much straight out of the box, at least on a modern Windows PC - although the price is a little on the high side for simple USB storage. But connect it to a local area network and Ximeta's pricing looks far more attractive. All you need do is install some software on the "client" computers, and they can all see the NetDisk. Multiple Windows 2000 and XP users can both read and write to the drive at once, and Ximeta's publicity champions the attribute that you don't need any IT knowledge, or have to mess around with IP addresses, to make it work.

For more demanding users, though, this is a flaw. First, they must install the NetDisk software on each computer sharing the drive. And it does not support more than one user with read and write access on computers running anything other than Windows 2000 and XP. This is despite claiming Mac, Windows and Linux compatibility on the box.

Running the drive on a non-XP or mixed network quickly becomes a pain: you have to "transfer" read/ write access to another user for them to copy files to the disk. This has to be done from the Ximeta software, which is awkward.

And the drive does not work out of the box at all with Macs. Users either have to format it as a Mac drive (making it useless to PC users) or reformat it to the Windows Fat32 standard. This needs third-party software, which Ximeta does not provide.

On top of this, the set-up instructions are far more complex than they should be, not least because one quick-start guide is in the box, covering three different Ximeta models. Although the documentation alludes to compatibility with routers and wireless networks, nowhere does it spell out exactly how to set up such a network. We managed to connect to a broadband router by trial and error - but small firms won't want to take a "plug and pray" approach to their networks.

Once set up, the drive is quick to use and reasonably quiet. But better software and documentation would make the NetDisk a far more attractive product. Ximeta, a new entrant to the UK market, has priced the drive aggressively and home users running XP can probably put up with its shortcomings. Small firms will want to spend a little more on a business-strength network-attached storage system.

THE VERDICT

Rating: 2 out of 5

Pros: network-ready, good value.

Cons: limited documentation, fiddly set-up, especially for larger local area networks.

Price: £309.

Contact: www.ximeta.com