Not Ready for Prime Time
February 11th, 2004 by Will
Ximeta’s NetDisk is NOT ready for prime time. I can’t get this thing to function at all. It’s a USB hard drive that also has an Ethernet jack. Basically, you throw it on your network, and then everybody is supposed to have access to this teeny little 160 GB file server.
Sounds cool right? It would be cool, if the stupid thing worked. I can get my work PC to see it without too much trouble. You have to use their admin tool to connect which is problem #1. Why do we need different software? Just put some stripped down version of Linux on there to act as a file server, and let me connect to it using normal networking protocols. Why complicate things with your proprietary software cruft?
Anyway, I didn’t buy it to have my work PC see it, so the fact that it can doesn’t help. I bought it so that my home computers (and really, my Macs) could use it. The box says that it works with Macs, but that’s looking more and more like a huge old exaggeration to me.
My PowerBook can’t see this thing to save its life. I can’t even mount it as a USB drive. The Mac sees the drive on the USB chain. It even sees the Fat 32 partition that it should be able to mount. It won’t mount it though. Maybe it’s too big, the web site says you may need to partition the thing into little 33 GB chunks. I’ve mounted larger drives that 32 GB on this Mac before though, so if it’s a real limitation, it just points to sucky software on the drive itself.
I hit their web site looking for answers, and didn’t find any. I did find an OS X driver to install. I installed that, but it helped me exactly not at all. I’ll keep playing with it, but for now, I’m really regretting my decision to purchase the thing.
Update: After formatting the drive with a Mac partition, I was finally able to get it to mount through USB 1 (I don’t have 2). USB 1 for the file sizes I’m looking at would be laughable though. I never did get the Mac to see it on the network (which was the point). I took the thing back. Life is too short to mess around with technologies that aren’t done cooking yet.
One Response to “Not Ready for Prime Time”
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I agree, the unit (I have the 160 too) is a POS. It advertises compatibility with w98, Linux, and Mac, and this would be easy to achieve with a little Linux Samba server, but it instead does SCSI emulation over the wire. It worked poorly via USB on my w98 box (kept going off-line during large transfers) and not at all via the network connection.
I’m going to take it back.