Maxtor Shared Storage Plus
Company: Maxtor Corporation
http://www.maxtor.com
200 GB $299.00
300 GB $399.95
500 GB $449.99
Like the sun rises every morning, personal computers get cheaper every day. More families can afford to have more of them.
More computers means more data: more digital photos, more Quicken account data, more digital music downloads, more homework, more business presentations. And all of them are critical to the owners.
Of course, every soccer Mom, overworked Dad, and high school Sam and Sally back up their data every night, right?
Yeah, right.
So, more computers means more data to be lost.
But backups are a hassle, and having a separate backup device for each home computer adds to the annoyance quotient.
One answer is to make a single backup device accessible to each personal computer via a network. With the number of home networks exploding, especially wireless networks, as networking itself becoming increasingly easy to setup, shared network storage devices have become both affordable and easy to use.
MyMac Labs has been using the 200GB version of Maxtor’s Shared Storage Plus network drive for several weeks. Fellow reviewer John Nemo and I have been exercising the drive to see how well it works.
The Shared Storage Plus line has great features:
*It’s mounted in a strong aluminum case.
*All the drives are 7200 RPM drives. The 200 GB model has an 8 MB cache. The 300 and 500 GB have 16 MB caches.
*If you need more space, you can attach additional external USB drives.
*Each user can have personal, password protected space, as well as access to a Public space.
It uses 10/100 Ethernet, which is universally available on all virtually any personal computer, even the $299 Walmart models.
*The software is very easy to use, and is geared to make backups as painless as possible. More on this below.
Installing the Shared Storage Plus.
Since the Shared Storage Plus (SSP for short) is designed for multiple computers, I set it up on my home network, and installed the software on my Dual G5 PowerMac, and my MacBook Pro.
The software install was quick and easy. The installer creates processes that run with root privileges, so it asks for your password. The backup software, called QuickStart, is not a Universal Binary, but it runs perfectly under the Rosetta emulator on my MacBook Pro. The manual talks about being able to use the installer to remove the software, but that’s not true for the Mac version. The only way I found to remove ALL the software parts is to download a Mac uninstaller from the Maxtor web site. Points off for this Mac-unfriendliness.
The SSP is configured via a Web interface, so I fired up Safari to finish the setup. I was able to configure most, but not all of the settings. A few pages would not load with either Safari or Camino, and would only respond to Internet Explorer. Given that IE for the Mac has not been supported for almost two years, this was annoying. Very annoying. Most Mac users don’t even have IE for the Mac, and the average user would not even think to try another browser. You’d think this alone would make the Maxtor Tech support folks crazy, having to deal with a Mac product that does not support Safari. More points off.
Once I had the SSP configured with accounts for the Dual G5 and the MacBook, I launched QuickStart.
For people who don’t like to backup, this is great software. For people who love tinkering with Retrospect, the most complex backup application I know of, they’ll be disappointed at QuickStart’s simplicity.
Quick Start does have some great features:
*It can do single or timed repetitive backups.
*It can rouse your Mac from sleep to run a timed backup. It can even start the Mac from a powered-off state, run the backup, then shutdown.
*It can keep up to five prior versions of each document.
*It can restore files to their original location, or to a different location.
Using Quick Start
I chose to backup several medium-sized folders, then clicked the Backup button.
Nothing appeared to happen, so I clicked Backup again. One annoying trait of Quick Start is that most functions have delays before things actually start; just long enough to make the user think their mouse-click was not registered. You have to wait 5-10 seconds before anything happens.
The Shared Storage Plus is a 10/100 Ethernet device, so file transfer speeds are adequate, but not blistering. File transfer speeds between the host Mac and the SSP when using wired Ethernet average about 5 MB/second. If you’re backing up gigabytes of data, take advantage of the timed backup capability, and do it in the middle of the night.
Given that all currently-shipping Macs have Gigabit Ethernet, I’d love to see Maxtor incorporate Gigabit Ethernet, as it’s much faster. I have a Gigabit switch for my network, and I regularly get 40 MB/second transfer rates between my Macs.
While Quick Start is very easy to use, it may not be reliable. I found that numerous files would not copy, even when I ran Quick Start immediately after a cold boot. The unsuccessful attempts ended with a dialog that said some files did not copy. Quick Start has an apparently undocumented logging feature (I could not find it in the manual) that told me about error 35 and 48, which was less than helpful.
I had files on both the G5 and the MacBook that would not copy, so the problem was not limited to one computer.
Quick Start should restore files. Simply click on the Restore button, wait for the annoying delay, and you’ll see a dialog box allowing you to choose which files to restore.
Unfortunately, the dialog box was always empty! I could never get the software to list the files on the SSP that I wanted restored.
The SSP has plenty of other nice features, including the ability to function as a media server. I actually got this feature to work reliably, and had the SSP feeding my music files to my SliMP3 music server.
But I can’t recommend the Maxtor Shared Storage Plus, at least for Macintosh users. The drive needs an outdated web browser to be fully configured, and has a slow user interface. Most importantly, not being able to copy files reliably, and not being able to restore files at all, means the SSP cannot perform its basic function.
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