Hitachi has released the SimpleTough and SimpleDrive Mini USB drives, along with SimpleNet. At $79, SimpleNet is a useful little USB to Ethernet box that turns the SimpleTough or SimpleDrive into a network attached storage (NAS) device on your local network.
SimpleNet works wirh non-Hitachi drives too. The USB drive appears as a drive on the network so you can easily share your pics, movies, tunes and documents with everyone on your network.
With no proprietary formats or reformatting of the drive required, you can easily hot swap your USB drive between your computer and the Hitachi SimpleNET device at any time.
[Ubergizmo]
TAGS:
Hitachi, NAS, SimpleNet, usb drives
I picked up one of these ar OfficeMax. It works pretty well for SMB only devices (no NFS support) and files under 4GB. Files over 4GB do not show on the clients even though they are visible if you SSH in to the box.
If you only need word documengs and FAT32, it’s pretty slick. For large files on EXT3 or NTFS, there are some gliches..