ximeta ndas netdisk (network storage)

[merrypig]

Anyone using or had experience with the ximeta network storage devices?

http://www.ximeta.com/products/netdisk.html

Bestbuy has(had) an offer on a 160GB unit that can attach via ethernet or usb2. Would be awesome for my setup...

Questions I have are:-

1/ how loud
2/ can the internal disk be replaced if it dies?
3/ can disk be upgraded beyond 160gb?
4/ how many on a network can be supported at once?
5/ how reliable are they? prone to network glitches? over wireless?
6/ mtbf?


The website answers most of these but I wanted to see if the real world experiences matched up.

Regards

[mustyone]

I have it attached Ethernet and my BTV has access to it over an 802.11b network. Its pretty rough going over the wireless network but I have not had any problems to speak of. Also I think they put out new drivers that fixes any issues they had with 802.11b.

The processor utiliztion is pretty high when using it.

It is very quiet. And easy to use.

It is basically just a hard drive enclosure(they just dont sell it without a disk yet). You can upgrade it to any standard IDE disk, and I dont think it has a size limitation(at least not built into the enclosure)

All in all I really like mine. It is very easy to use and the ethernet fuction can come in pretty handy.

[mustyone]

Yea,

It does have a pretty cool feature. You can stripe a whole bunch of disks together over the ethernet interface and create a really big NAS and only one logical disk (many physical disks). They call it agregating the volumes.

I haven't tired it ( I only own one) but it seems like a pretty cool idea. It would be a bit more expensive than building a dedicated pc, but I would think it would be les prone to OS problems. And hey, you would be the coolest kid on the block.

[mustyone]

Yea it scares me a bit too.

Acctually there is no limit to the number of stripes you can have. Just a practicallity limit. You can also mirror them just as you would in Raid 10, but I dont think the ximeta disk mirroring has automatic failover to the mirrored disk for uninterupted operation. Cool idea, but not sure if it will take off.