networked hard drive enclosure alternatives??

[oblivionx]

i'm looking into buying a networked hard drive, spec. the Buffalo LinkStation 250GB- seems like a great deal for 300 bucks (http://www.compuplus.com/insidepage.php3?sid=9c99w3wqk7iep3b&id=1002675&track=searchViewed).


my question for all you experts here is: are there hard drive enclosures that have ethernet ports on them so that i can simply plug an external hard drive into my wireless router? this is essentially the same idea as the Buffalo Linkstation, but if i can do it with my own hard drive and an enclosure, i'd rather do that since i can get a much bigger hd for 300 bucks. let me know! thanks all-

[SoulkeepHL]

I've never used one, but I have a friend that swears by his Ximeta Netdisk. http://www.ximeta.com/ Its usb 2.0 and ethernet enabled. They sell the enclosure by itself (no hdd) as the NDAS™ Enclosure, unfortunately, cheapest i could find it for was ~$140, which was a bit pricey for my needs when I could buy a simple usb 2.0 enclosure for $20.

[cyr0n_k0r]

Ximeta sent me one of their 80GB versions about a year ago. It lasted about 9 months. It is pretty cool.

2 downsides.

1) it requires software to access drive. Easiest thing is to load software on server, then share drive from server and map the drive on any clients. (thus no software on clients)

2) it has no "off" switch. You have to actually pull the plug on the power (which is the reason mine died).

I moved mine around alot so I had to always unplug the drive. After about 9 months it finally died. The drive wasn't too messed up... I opened up the enclousure and pulled the drive out and hooked it up as a slave to my computer and managed to recover most of the data.

Just a heads up.

[willsy]

Using a Synology DS-101 Disk Station. www.synology.com Costs about £170.00 (UK)

Doesn't come with a hard drive, but most IDE drives up to 300 gig are suitable.I'm using a 300 gig Maxtor MaxLine 5400rpm drive as a storage server for Meedio.

Uses a utility for the initial setup, but then any further maintenance can be done using a web interface.