Ximeta Netdisk

21 FEB 2005

Ximeta Netdisk

An external hard drive is simply an internal hard drive with an enclosure. What makes them useful is that they are simply portable. Rather than having to constantly open up the case of your computer, you can just simply lift and carry it with you. This makes it ideal for those who would like a portable drive which can hold their large files.

Although the functionality of external hard drives are the same, companies still have several ways to differentiate their drive from others. One factor is the design of the enclosure. Several questions we might ask is whether it looks good or whether it dissipates heat well. Another important factor is the interface. For example, some external drives offer USB 2.0, while some are more flexible providing both USB 2.0 and Firewire. Lastly, is the performance of the drive. The typical consumer can only predict or have some expectation about the performance. What we really want to know is how well this drive performs in comparison to other devices.

Today, I will be reviewing the Ximeta Netdisk. This is essentially an external hard drive, but what makes this uniquely different from others is that this can be plugged into a local area network and be able to share the drive with others on the network. By sharing the drive on a network, it can allow one user to "dump" files onto the drive and allow another person on the network to retrieve it. We will explore its networking capabilities as well as examining the performance of the drive.

Packaging/Contents

The NetDisk came in an attractive blue box that caught my eye immediately. At the front of the box, there is a picture of the drive itself. You can immediately judge for yourself if you like how it looks, although most people will not really care what it looks like unless it looked very ugly. The front says that the drive is easy to install, can use secure access, can be networked, and is a portable USB hard drive.

The curious consumer might wonder how this drive can be networked. Luckily, at the back of the box, there is a diagram that shows that you can plug the drive into an ethernet switch on an existing local area network. So far, it sounds fairly simple.

When opening the box, I noticed that everything was neatly packaged. At the top of the box was a CD and a single piece of paper. The paper was not a quick installation guide as expected, it was just a sheet which just had a list of the contents of the box. It also explains how to use the CD to help setup the drive for your situation. The drive itself was placed securely in between two large pieces of foam to help prevent damage.

There are the necessary cables to setup the drive. There is a USB cable which has the standard USB connector on one side and a smaller sized one on the other side. Also, Ximeta provided a network cable. Although network cables are probably plentiful these days, it's nice that you don't need to go find one or

Included with the drive is an AC adapter. The AC adapter is composed of two separate pieces. The adapter is quite similar to the one you might expect for a laptop computer.

A Closer Look at the NetDisk


The drive itself is not too large. Compared with a typical internal desktop hard drive, it is slightly longer and wider on the sides. It's dimensions are 8.3"(H) x 4.7"(W) x 1.4"(H). At the top of the drive is the NetDisk logo followed by the word 'NDAS', which basically means that this drive can be used as network storage. At the front of the drive is just the Ximeta logo.

The bottom of the drive shows the drive capacity as well as its speed. This was a 7200RPM 120GB drive. There are labels which additionally show the serial number and other identification aspects of the product.

At the top of the drive are LED's that indicate whether the drive is currently powered and whether there is any current disk activity. It would have been preferred if those LED's were either put at the front of the drive so it would be easier to see. If you were to place the drive flat on your desk, you have the tendency to move your head closer just to be able to see the LED's.

The back of the drive has all the connectors associated with the drive. Starting from the left is the on/off switch. Next is the USB connector, AC adapter, and the last one on the right is the network wire connector. This drive does support USB 2.0, but not FireWire.

Installation

Installing the external drive is actually minimal no matter if you intend on just using it as direct storage or if you plan on connecting it to a local area network. When using it just for personal storage, all you have to do is plug the USB connector from the drive to the computer. I did notice that the drive was not able to power on with just the USB cable connected. Therefore, I had to plug in the AC adapter as well to the drive. After flipping the power switch on the drive, the drive turned on since the power LED lit up. I'm currently using Windows XP with Service Pack 1. Windows XP was able to detect and install the drive automatically without any problems. I have seen other external drives that do require extra software and drivers to install the drive correctly. If you intend on using an external drive with multiple computers, it can be a real hassle having to constantly install drivers onto the computer. This drive avoids all these problems by lettings Windows automatically detect and install the drive.

If you intend on using this drive as a networked drive. All you have to do is plug it into an existing router, gateway, or switch on an existing local area network. I plugged the drive into a ethernet hub and I was ready to go. I was able to see the drive on the network from another computer. When you use the CD to install the drive as a network drive, you are given two options: you can either allow only one person to write the drive at any one time, or you can allow multiple people to write to the drive at once. The only catch of allowing multiple people to write is that it may slow the overall performance of the drive when in use.

Performance

In order to get an initial idea of the performance of the drive, I transferred approximately 20GB of files onto the drive. It only took about 20 minutes which is actually very fast.

When using HDTach to test the sequential read performance of the drive, the drive provided solid performance at around 33 MB per second. It also had a random access time of 13.7ms.

When doing a file system benchmark using Sisoft's Sandra 2004, it was on par with HDTach's results with a sequential read of 30MB per second. The drive had a buffered write speed of 26MB per second with an average access time of 8ms. When comparing it to Sandra's database, the drive's performance is slightly slower than an actual internal ATA100 80GB desktop drive. You can think of it as the small sacrifice in performance, but in exchange for portability.

Heat never seems to be a problem with this drive. Because of the outer aluminum casing, it does help dissipate heat better than something like plastic. Even under normal use or even long periods of heavy use, the outer casing of the external drive would only feel warm, but never hot.

Conclusion

What I like about this drive is that it is a solid-looking unit that performs well. The network capabilities of this drive expand the ways that you can use an external drive. In this case, the drive can be easily shared on a local area network. In addition, I also liked how easy it was to install. There was no need to install any additional drivers because Windows was able to take care of that. The performance of this drive is good, but still slightly slower than a typical internal desktop drive. Most people anyways will not notice the difference in performance. Because this external drive contains a 7200 RPM drive, I was not able to power the drive on the USB cable alone. Therefore, you will need to the carry the AC adapter with you.

Reviewed by ronald@digitalreviews.net

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