On Wed, 8 Nov 2006 10:02:45 -0000, <nospam@invalid.invalid>
wrote:
>Does anyone own one of these?
>
>http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/MSS_Plus/
>
>I'm thinking about buying one, but really would love to know if you can use
>the darn thing without any proprietary software - for example - can I just
>map a drive in windows to the hard drive without using the software that
>comes with it?
>
>Also (if the drive fails) can you rip out the drive and plug in another one
>without formatting it in some odd format and get it to work just by mapping
>to the ip?
>
>Really I just want my DHCP server to allocate it an address and then I can
>browse to it without any software. Can it do this?
>
First, it would be good to link to the actual manufacturer's
product page instead of the advertising 'site. That's, of
course, on maxtor.com.
It doesn't require proprietary software, uses TCP/IP and
appears in Network neighborhood and is reconfigured with
your browser via HTTP. Which options there are for DHCP
assigment, I don't know, but it shouldn't really matter, as
you could still manually specify the address if it doesn't
support that, and IMO, you don't ever want DHCP assigned
anyway, not on a device where you essentially want the
address static, leaving the options of either setting it per
device, or having need of a router that supports static IP
assignments (which is fairly common today, but nevertheless,
unnecessary with a NAS-like device).
I doubt you can take a drive with existing data on it and
plug it in, but maybe if the drive were FAT32 formatted.
Read over the user guide, particularly note that USB
attached drives must have FAT32 filesystem which is a pretty
significant limit. I dont' know what filesystem the main
drive uses or supports, or if the user can partition/format
a drive after being installed in the enclosure, on the lan.
http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/...tion_guide.pdf
Security on it looks to be pretty weak, in that anyone might
be able to reset the password(s) by merely pressing the
reset switch on the back- but maybe in your use it wouldn't
matter.