Found! External USB/Ethernet hard drives

[vetteguy]

In the latest Tigerdirect catalog they had a series of external USB hard drives that also had an integrated ethernet connector, which allowed you to directly connect them to your LAN. I can't find my catalog, and of course I can't find them on the tigerdirect.com site either. Does anyone know who makes these things or know of where I can get more information? Thanks.

And yes, I've tried google.

 

[buleyb]

I just looked through the latest TigerDirect catelog, didn't see anything like that...more hints for me to try?

 

[Sheriff]

That's news to me, maybe the other connector was for Firewire?

 

[vetteguy]

It was near the end of the catalog...no, it wasn't firewire, it was definitely ethernet. It said something like enabling business users to easily add storage to their network without expensive NAS devices. It came in like 120, 160, 200, etc. capacities. I think I may still have the catalog at home, I'll try to find it.

 

[vetteguy]

Found it! These are the units here They're called "Netdisks"/ CompUSA sells them too. They look really cool, I might actually replace my file server with a couple of these things.

 

[dkozloski]

My experience is that they are not reliable and if a drive fails there is no way to replace it and get the unit going again because of some proprietary software issues. You can't get it up and running unless it is up and running.

 

[vetteguy]

Originally posted by: dkozloski
My experience is that they are not reliable and if a drive fails there is no way to replace it and get the unit going again because of some proprietary software issues. You can't get it up and running unless it is up and running.

Could you give me some more information about your experience with them? From what I can gather, they are brand new and have only been available a month or two. I can't imagine how an external hard drive would use proprietaty software to read data. Also, if you have used these units, do you know if the take standard 3.5" drives inside?

 

[dkozloski]

The units I was stuck with did not have the USB interface. The problem was that they required that a boot routine had to be written to the disc in order to communicate with it but you couldn't write the routine unless you could communicate with it already. Catch 22.

 

[vetteguy]

Originally posted by: dkozloski
The units I was stuck with did not have the USB interface. The problem was that they required that a boot routine had to be written to the disc in order to communicate with it but you couldn't write the routine unless you could communicate with it already. Catch 22.

Were these units made by XiMeta?