Product Reviews

If you have masses of photos, videos and MP3s that you'd like to share among several PCs, then a NAS box is for you. Maxtor's Shared Storage II might be the solution you've been looking for - it has an enormous capacity of 1 terabyte (TB), or around 1024GB.

To reach the 1TB mark the Shared Storage uses two 500GB disks joined together in a RAID 0 array. This means that if one disk fails, you'll lose any data not backed up elsewhere. If keeping your files safe and secure is a priority, you can choose to configure the Shared Storage as a RAID 1 array instead. This will halve the amount of available space, but means that if one disk fails there'll

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still be a copy of your data on the remaining disk.

If you're paranoid about people deleting your precious files, then you can restrict access to certain folders for certain users, but it's a shame you can't set quotas to stop users from gobbling up too much disk space with their files. You can also quickly and easily allow any computer on your network to print to an attached USB printer or access the contents of an attached USB disk.

Having 1TB of storage space is of little to no use if it takes forever to copy files, though. In our large files test the NAS device wrote at 13.18MB/s and read them at 11.08MB/s. In our small files test, it wrote at 1.34MB/s and read at 2.57MB/s. It may not be the fastest device we've seen, but it's still quicker than most.

The Shared Storage II is supposed to be able to stream stored music, movies and photos to a Universal Plug and Play network media player. But we had trouble getting our Philips Streamium player to recognise the Maxtor consistently and reliably. Despite this flaw, when it did work our DVD action movie played back smoothly. The unit's apparent high price also obscures the fact that the Shared Storage is actually pretty inexpensive as it only costs 57p per GB.