If you’d like to share all the precious contents and data on your USB flash drive, external USB hard drive or SD card, you can then make use of the newly announced Hitachi SimpleNet USB NAS adapter to turn all the mentioned devices into a NAS.
The Hitachi USB NAS adapter, once hooked up with a USB memory stick, hard disk drive or SD memory card, will then turn them into a network attached storage, which can be accessed and shared over the LAN. The little Hitachi NAS adapter is a compact one, which offers two USB ports and one Ethernet port of 100Mbps for bringing those storage devices online.
This Hitachi NAS adapter does not seem to come with an memory card slot, but you can get a USB memory card reader, insert your memory card into it and then hook the card reader up to the SimpleNet NAS adapter. The NAS adapter does not require formatting of USB drives as it’s Linux-based. It works with almost all USB-based storae devices but printers are not supported. Hitachi claims it works with most backup clients including Apple’s Time Machine.
The SimpleNet NAS adapter also ships with software for both PCs and Macs for setting up accounts, hard drives, monitor drive status and set protocol controls. You can even get more advanced with it if you know what to do. Such as configuring it as FTP access drives, iTunes server, DLNA media servers or SSH server for secure shell command line access. It supports Bonjour zero-config networks and various file systems including FAT32, NTFS, HFS, EXT3 etc.
The Hitachi SimpleNet NAS adapter is now shipping for $80. It works with various OSes, including Windows XP, Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X 10.4 and above.
via electronista
July 21st, 2009 at 3:40 am
[...] Hitachi’s new brand SimpleTech has a better way of keeping their external USB hard drive cool i.e using bamboo. Bamboo is thought to be able to dissipate heat more effectively by Hitachi. The bamboo-cooled external hard drive is called [re]Drive, which uses bamboo as the main heat sink and eliminates the need for fan to keep cool. [...]
July 24th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
I’m an early adopter of the SimpleNET. Good device; however, in Windows 7 RC1 x64, the CIFS file system does not read/display ISO files over SimpleNET. Oddly, the included FTP server will display ISO files. This reduces the value of the device since you cannot play DVDs packed as ISOs using a media streamer (e.g., WDTV). Hopefully, a firmware update will resolve this in short order.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Correction. After further testing, SimpleNET will display ISOs of smaller file sizes, but larger file sizes (for example 3.5GB-4.3GB) do not display in file directories. And yes, this was observed on NTFS formatted drives. I have not tested whether this file-size-limit issue applies to all file formats. Since DVD5 and DVD9 ISO files exceed these limits, the observed problem remains–you cannot stream a DVD across SimpleNET.
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:08 am
[...] Here comes the Seagate FreeAgent DockStar, a special docking that is made to allow the Seagate FreeAgent Go external hard drive to plug into it and be used as a networked storage like a NAS. [...]
November 4th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Nov. 4 UPDATE — Hitachi has released a firmware upgrade that addresses the problem. It turns out the original firmware was based on an outdated version of Samba, so file sizes were limited to 2GB. The firmware update to the NAS’ file system eliminates this limitation. Good job SimpleTech, although it took longer than I expected for you to fix this.