Maxtor Shared Storage II
The Maxtor Shared Storage II contains two hard drives, and can be purchased with either one or two terabytes of storage capacity. The stated storage capacity is the sum of the capacities of the individual drives. So if you’re interested in buying the device, consider what type of configuration they wish to run on the NAS device before they make their purchase—if run in RAID 1 mode, the specified storage capacity is halved.
Construction
The dark grey plastic housing is dressed up a bit by a silver stripe on the front of the unit where you’ll find the network and drive activity LEDs, as well as the status indicator. The top and bottom of the housing are made of a rubbery plastic, ensuring that the unit does not slip even on smooth surfaces.
The 2.7 kg Maxtor Shared Storage II reflects solid construction. On the rear of the unit there is a Gigabit Ethernet connection and two USB ports, as well as the connection for the external power supply and an on/off switch. Ventilation slots on the top and bottom of the unit, combined with the built-in fan, ensure that the contained drives get plenty of cool air. But the fact that a user may wish to replace the drives has not been taken into consideration. Should a drive fail and you need to replace it yourself, you’ll have to take the unit apart and break the warranty seal.
Bundle And Power Consumption
The hardware package includes the Shared Storage NAS unit, an external power supply with power cable, an Ethernet cable, and a quick start handbook. Three CD ROMs are also included. In addition to the user handbook in various languages, these contain the manuals for the Maxtor Easy Manage and Maxtor Backup software for both Windows and Macintosh computers. A version of this software that has been adapted for use with Windows Vista is available on the third CD.
With 21 watts of power consumed when idle and 32 watts during normal operation, the Maxtor Shared Storage II is one of the more efficient units around.
Software Installation
An easy-to-follow wizard guides you through the installation process. After a restart, the Maxtor Easy Manage Software is immediately available for use. If the Maxtor Shared Storage II unit is already switched on and has a connection to the network, the software shows the MAC and IP addresses of the NAS device, as well as the host name. The prerequisite for a successful IP address assignment is a functional DHCP server, which takes on the assignment of IP addresses in a network and is typically embedded in the network’s router.
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kwl review for this device. I wonder though if it allowed for mtu/jumbo, vpn security config n such. Prob not but that woulda been a nice touch.
The Silent Majority
These home NAS storage solutions need raid 5 and support for at least 4 drives. Until then my old AMD 500 will continue to chug away...
"But the fact that a user may wish to replace the drives has not been taken into consideration. Should a drive fail and you need to replace it yourself, you’ll have to take the unit apart and break the warranty seal."
If a drive fails and it's still under warranty, it would only seem logical to invoke the warranty protection and get a free drive. If a drive fails and it isn't under warranty, then breaking the warranty seal wouldn't be a problem. Doesn't seem like a particularly important detail.
What's the point of the tiny images where I can't read anything?
What's the point of the tiny images where I can't read anything?
"...And so, with a clash of lightning that split apart the heavens, and with a mighty voice, God said unto Abraham: 'Click on the image twice you doofus!'".
I do agree that clicking on the image once to get the main image page, and then a SECOND time to get the full-sized image is stupid, but if they were to insert the full-sized image in the main article, the article would be pretty hard to read through.
I had one of those little warranty stickers on my old Mactor One-Touch. With a razor and some patience you can get that sucker off without breaking it.
If a drive fails and it's still under warranty, it would only seem logical to invoke the warranty protection and get a free drive.
Except that this will involve sending your still perfectly functional drive away, where it will be perused by whoever while you have no access to it yourself. Not an acceptable solution to me. This is yet another FAIL solution for home NAS, I'm afraid.
serp9000
the problem is you'll have to do without your data while you wait for the warranty work. do you really trust sending out your one good copy?
Let me see...Raid 1 means you can replace a failed drive with a new one and the second drive (the "mirror") still contains the data. But now, you have to replace the failed drive so the mirror can be rebuilt...but you cannot without voiding the warranty. Do I have this straight? If so, this is simply a disaster waiting to happen. Especially with the high drive failure rate reported by customers. Still waiting for a good home NAS.
Buy this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817707125
Buy your drives.
Call it a day.
Performance is lackluster at best, especially in raid-0! Let me rephrase, performance is TERRIBLE.
The chances of the working disk getting damaged while shipping the whole box back for a single failed drive are WAY higher than the chances I'll damage it opening it, but considering the literacy of the users of such a slow NAS... I'll stick with my homebrew NAS kthx
Or this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817332017
Use Raid 10 it's just as secure as RAID 5. you need 4 drives for RAID 10 however. use the last slot has a spare.
You gotta go e-sata for performance. Then just share the drive for other users to access it. At the minimum you need a gigabit connection but for that to work you need gigabit through out your house.
Otherwise you're stuck at 100Mbit. USB is 480Mbit for a comparison of theoretical throughput.
Performance is lackluster at best, especially in raid-0! Let me rephrase, performance is TERRIBLE.The chances of the working disk getting damaged while shipping the whole box back for a single failed drive are WAY higher than the chances I'll damage it opening it, but considering the literacy of the users of such a slow NAS... I'll stick with my homebrew NAS kthx
eSATA will only work for computers w/in a few feet of the NAS. GigE through the house isnt that hard, just make sure you have a GigE switch somewhere, most recently built/wired houses have GigE wiring, its been pretty standard in terms of wiring for some time now. Cost of USB wiring throughout the house pretty much knocks that out. So GigE or .. well to be honest the performance on this system was so bad it'd be fine on 100Mb with the exception of only one graph which showed > 14MB/s results.
What were they thinking when they implemented Raid-1? The whole point is to be able to easily replace the defective drive, have the NAS rebuild it as soon as possible, and have some peace of mind that your data is again sort of safe. Now they want a customer to entrust their valuable data and send it off to who knows where to be viewable whoever.
Thats a deal breaker.
I suppose my imperfect knowledge of RAID arrays doomed me. I assumed that you would still be able to remove the data from the one working drive. Big fail on my part, it seems.
Sure you can remove the data from the working drive but that would entail a user who has more than 500GBs of it to keep a backup drive for a backup solution. HDD are pretty cheap now a days, but nonetheless that in my opinion defeats the purpose of having raid1.
I've had one of these units (the 320GB version) for over a year. I was after a simple, small, low power NAS box that could sit on my home network to store & share my families MP3 collection. I only use the Web interface to set it up (I don't load any software on my PC/s) and don't use the raid mode at all.
It works OK, but it is slow and has some quirks with media player (9/10/11 on 4 PCs) when playing files (VLC doesn't seem to have the same problem though). I also automatically clone my work to the unit every hour just as another repository. The unit gives the perception that it's underpowered (CPU wise, I assume it's some embedded processor running linux?)
One of the main reasons I bought this unit was that is was cheap & had an external USB HDD & Printer connector. I haven't used the printer port(yet), but I did buy an external eSata/USB2 drive enclosure in which I put a 500GB drive. I can plug this into the NAS box for extra storage or I can also plug the same unit(when required) into the eSata port on a couple of my PC's if I need some temporary extra(fast) storage(sometimes for video editing/converting across drives).
I'd give the unit 7/10.
My smaller/earlier Maxtor SSII has a severely disfunctional mediabolic UPnP server that is compatible with pretty much nothing and even fails tests in Intel UPnP validation suite. You seem to have just given the UPnP server in this NAS a "pass" based on its documentation... you really ought to test it and tell us if actually works.
For the purposes of data security, a NAS device with THREE drives is preferable to one with only two drives. Raid-1 with 3 drives FTW.
I don't know why it's so difficult for an empty Raid-1 box with 3 drive slots and GB LAN at a reasonable price to come to market. You would think that a simple Raid-1 controller chip in a plain black aluminum box would be cheap. Not $500.
Just reading about this NAS solution in other pages a found the comments and reviews from amazon customers: selfexplicatived. http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-STM3 [...] B000GOUE3S