Great Deal on Network HD

2232 Views 10 Replies 7 Participants Last post by Bill Gordon, Sep 11, 2007

guytoronto

Discussion Starter · Sep 9, 2007

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pr...angid=EN&sku_id=0665000FS10091788&catid=23795

Just bought one, found the Mac drivers here:
http://www.ximeta.com/

Makes backing up my Mac and PC over a wireless network a lot easier.

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1 - 11 of 11 Posts

That is an excellent price.

I bought a Vantec network enclosure for about $70, added an IDE hard drive and tried to set it up on a Mac & PC wireless network, but gave up in frustration.

How did you choose format the drive - Fat32, NTFS or HFS+ extended?

Now, I'm using an Airport Extreme N base station and USB hard drive sharing. It works great, but formatting the drive creates a number of compromises. The Mac can't write to NTFS. PC's don't recognize HFS+ and there is a 4 GB file size limitation using Fat32, so image backups are out of the question.

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HowEver

· #3 · Sep 9, 2007

What's faster, a drive networked using a wireless router via ethernet, or a drive networked to your Airport Extreme via USB2?

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MACSPECTRUM

· #4 · Sep 9, 2007

Bill Gordon said:
That is an excellent price.

I bought a Vantec network enclosure for about $70, added an IDE hard drive and tried to set it up on a Mac & PC wireless network, but gave up in frustration.

How did you choose format the drive - Fat32, NTFS or HFS+ extended?

Now, I'm using an Airport Extreme N base station and USB hard drive sharing. It works great, but formatting the drive creates a number of compromises. The Mac can't write to NTFS. PC's don't recognize HFS+ and there is a 4 GB file size limitation using Fat32, so image backups are out of the question.

they do if you install MacDrive 7 on each Windows PC

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RISCHead

· #5 · Sep 9, 2007

HowEver said:
What's faster, a drive networked using a wireless router via ethernet, or a drive networked to your Airport Extreme via USB2?

USB2 should be much faster. In addition to just raw data speed, being a direct connected drive avoids the overhead and inefficiency of NFS protocols as well as the typically poor implementation of NFS for 99.9% of these cheap consumer devices (as opposed to NetApp for example who now compete effectively in the enterprise storage market on NFS technology).

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RISCHead

· #6 · Sep 9, 2007

This is a great price!

Personally, I'm generally very picky over my hard drives and tend to avoid packaged solutions like these.
At NCIX, I can get a 320GB Seagate Barracuda for a similar price (plus enclosure cost).
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=18409&vpn=ST3320620AS&manufacture=Seagate

and pick your enclosure of choice - eSATA/USB/FW/NAS.

So for 20-30% more, I get exactly what I want.

Of course, as I said above, this is a great price and you get the option of USB/NAS.

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RISCHead

· #7 · Sep 9, 2007

Bill Gordon said:
That is an excellent price.

I bought a Vantec network enclosure for about $70, added an IDE hard drive and tried to set it up on a Mac & PC wireless network, but gave up in frustration.

How did you choose format the drive - Fat32, NTFS or HFS+ extended?

Now, I'm using an Airport Extreme N base station and USB hard drive sharing. It works great, but formatting the drive creates a number of compromises. The Mac can't write to NTFS. PC's don't recognize HFS+ and there is a 4 GB file size limitation using Fat32, so image backups are out of the question.

If you don't want to spend any additional $$, you can connect the USB drive to your Mac directly, and export the filesystems to Windows (OS X will use Samba automatically to provide SMB/CIFS services). You can then use HFS+ extended.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=151667

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TheBat

· #8 · Sep 9, 2007

I still prefer the idea of a separate PC acting as network attached storage. I've heard that even a Pentium II will do the job.

At present I know that my PBook will connect and write to (via Samba) a shared disk on an XP computer (NTFS). When this PC is retired, it will only be used for NAS.

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Bill Gordon

· #9 · Sep 10, 2007

MACSPECTRUM said:
they do if you install MacDrive 7 on each Windows PC

I actually own a copy of MacDrive 7 that I use in my Boot Camp Windows XP Pro partition. It works extremely well and allows me to use Boot Camp most of the time now, as opposed to my Parallels setup, which I now only use if I think I need to cust and paste between PC and Mac.

I assumed MacDrive might not work on an HFS+ networked drive, but maybe I should give it a try.

I wish there was a MacDrive type utility that would allow Mac users to read & write to NTFS.

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Daktari

· #10 · Sep 10, 2007

Bill Gordon said:
...

I wish there was a MacDrive type utility that would allow Mac users to read & write to NTFS.

Try this solution, I used it for a while to transfer some data from an hold usb hard drive. It worked well.

I would advise you to backup before installing MacFuse.

By the way macs can read but not write to NTFS.

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Bill Gordon

· #11 · Sep 11, 2007

Daktari said:
By the way macs can read but not write to NTFS.

I wonder if Leopard can, or will, address this issue? It sure would simplify things for folks with feet in both camps.

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