Labs

Maxtor has only recently started to support Macs with its shared storage devices, but it has done a cracking job of making them accessible to us. The utility that comes with the Maxtor Shared Storage Plus not only helps locate it on your network, but prompts you to configure and add shares, set it up as a media server and initiate backup plans.

This backup system is fairly basic, and only works one way - backing up files from client computers to the Nas unit, not backing up the Nas device itself - but works sufficiently well for simple backup tasks. Impressively, it can even offer some versioning control to restore

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from up to 10 previous versions of backed up files.

The server-based administration pages are attractive and easy to understand. In fact, it feels a lot like Western Digital's in terms of approachability, although it lacks the contextual, embedded help system present in the Synology Nas drive.

However, it does a great job of implementing a full users and groups system and making it feel human. We particularly liked the flexible approach to assigning permissions to users, groups and shares.

As with others in this group, the Maxtor model can act as a Universal Plug and Play media server - of no interest to Mac users per se, but if you have a media streaming box that supports UPnP, you can stream songs and movies directly from the Shared Storage Plus. It promises iTunes integration, too, but it's severely undocumented, and although we tried everything we could think of, we just couldn't get it to work, despite a shared library appearing in iTunes' Source List.

This is a good device, but its insistence on SMB networking protocol slows it down and means it's missing some features Mac users usually take for granted, such as proper support for file creation/modification/backup dates.