The gap between what you can store on your hard drive and what's available in removable storage or backup seems to have grown in recent years, making a routine task like backup hard to do economically. The same problem rears its head when you want to replace a system and migrate some of the data.
Into this breach steps Ximeta's NetDisk, an interesting twist on the many portable hard drives on the market today. Like many others, NetDisk has a USB 2.0 interface that allows rapid copy from any so-equipped system. But NetDisk also has another option, which Ximeta calls network direct-attached storage, or NDAS, that makes this device more useful.
You can plug NetDisk into your LAN with a standard Ethernet cable. Sound like network-attached storage? Close, but not exactly -- you also need to install drivers and go through a short initialization process on any client systems you want to be able to address the disk. The drive will show up in Windows Explorer as removable storage whenever you boot up. You can also unplug it from the Net at will.
Once on the Net, NetDisk can store data for any system with drivers installed. But it lacks a locking mechanism, so only one system at a time should use a given file. And only one user at a time can write to the disk.
I checked out an 80 GB unit, but 120 and 160 GB units are also available ($269 and $289, respectively). NetDisk's software, however, allows you to chain up to 10 drives together as a single logical drive. You can also create mirror sets with multiple drives. Without too much trouble, you can readily create a network backup facility that either eliminates the need for tape or creates a single source for tape backup.
NetDisk works with Windows 2000 and XP, as well as the Mac. It does not work with Windows Server 2003.
I found the unit to work well (inside, it's a 7,200 RPM ATA drive with a 100 Mbps Ethernet interface), but the software has a few rough (but non-fatal) edges. In addition to the locking issues, for example, if you like to put your desktop in standby mode at night, you'll have to disable the NetDisk through an icon in the desktop tray first. Given the convenience of being able to deploy a large amount of new storage without opening a case or buying a new system, that was a price I was willing to pay.
