Editor's note: The Maxtor Shared Storage Plus line fully replaces the Maxtor Shared Storage line, which we reviewed last year. Users of the older Shared Storage line can contact Maxtor for a free upgrade. This review addresses the new Shared Storage Plus drive.
In Australia there are three capacities available 200 GB (AU$399), 300 GB (AU$499) and 500 GB (AU$699). We reviewed the 300GB modelSince the introduction of the Maxtor's OneTouch Backup external drives, Maxtor has consistently vied for top spot in the consumer external storage market. The Shared Storage Plus, a network-attached storage drive, has all the qualities that have kept the company in contention: handsome packaging, good performance, easy setup, loads of features and useful software. It's also pricey and lacks the Gigabit Ethernet that would future-proof it, but that's the case with most consumer hard drives.
Design and installation
Like other single-drive configuration Maxtor external boxes, the Shared Storage Plus has a thin silver body and comes with a grey plastic stand so that you can orient the drive vertically. However, Maxtor's latest models dissipate heat better than their predecessors. A thin metal grating on the front provides increased airflow, allowing the unit to run cool to the touch, as well as adding a bit of class to the unit's appearance. A single button on the front of the unit serves as a power switch and a status light, while the rear of the unit is home to the AC power jack, two USB ports, and the Ethernet jack.
Setting up the Shared Storage Plus drive is a breeze. Plug in the power, attach it to your router, browse to the MSHome workgroup under Network Places where it appears, and you're ready to go. Right-click the drive name and assign it a drive letter using the Map Network drive if you want to use it from Windows Explorer.
Most users will want to tweak the default settings, such as what workgroup the drive appears under. You can do this using the supplied Maxtor Manager utility, or you can check your router's DHCP table for the drive and surf directly to the onboard HTML setup program using the drive's URL (for example, 192.168.0.8). The HTML setup app is one of the more attractive and intuitive applications we've seen, as is the bundled Retrospect Express HD backup software. HD offers a vast improvement in usability over previous Retrospect Express versions, albeit minus some bells and whistles.
Features
If you have plans for a home multimedia network, the Shared Storage Plus can be used as a media server. It's UPnP (Universal Plug 'n' Play) and DLNA compliant (Digital Living Network Alliance) and can stream audio, video, or photos to any PC or UPnP- or DLNA-compatible device, such as D-Link's GSM-520 or MediaLounge DSM-320, which will display them on your TV or play them over your audio system.
The Shared Storage Plus lets you expand its capacity or share additional drives via its two USB ports. Simply attach any USB flash or external hard drive (or even a printer) that you want to share across the network. If the drive supported Gigabit Ethernet, we'd say it was almost feature-perfect. But streaming high-bandwidth HD stresses the capabilities of 10/100 Ethernet, and since Maxtor has taken the one step with serving multimedia, we're wondering why the company didn't take the second.
Performance
Considering it's chipped only for 10/100BaseTX Ethernet, the Shared Storage Plus's performance was excellent. The drive bested the Iomega StorCenter 250 by a wide margin to finish in a virtual dead heat with Western Digital's NetCenter, a nice but less feature-laden drive. The 300GB (16MB cache) Shared Storage Plus drive that we tested wrote 5GB of mixed file types in 23 minutes, 34 seconds and read the same files in 21 minutes, 19 seconds.
DVD movie rip/burn tests (min:sec) (Shorter bars indicate better performance)
 |
5GB read test | |
5GB write test |
Maxtor Shared Storage Plus (7,200rpm)
21:19
23:34
Iomega StorCenter (7,200rpm)
23:27
30:40
NOTE: Products in this test are for comparative purposes only and are not necessarily available in the Australian market.
SupportMaxtor provides adequate service and support for the Shared Storage Plus, with a standard one-year warranty. The docs and the setup sheet are easy to read and informative, and there's a ton of help available online at the company's Web site in the form of FAQs, a knowledge base and software downloads.
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televisions
28/05/2008, 08:35 PM
rating
8/10
Great device for my small business. I use this shared storage device. It rocks. Its device benefits are much than its price. I prefer this shared storage device to all businessmen.
Pros: Stylish and attractive design.
Easy to use and understand.
Enough storage for any business use.
Cons: Costly.
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mattconnolly
02/10/2007, 01:09 PM
rating
2/10
Ridiculously slow access from a Mac. Flat out achieving 1MB/s. Very slow to wake up from sleep
Pros: It's a network attached storage drive.
Cons: Slow to start.
Slow to transfer files.
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sh
10/09/2007, 08:32 PM
rating
3/10
I have a 300GB drive which failed after 10 months. Thought it was power supply but after Maxtor (Seagate) sent replacement, drive still fails to power up.
Cons: Seems prone to failure
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log
22/01/2007, 10:37 PM
rating
3/10
I have the drive for about 8 months. It's a 500GB model.
Altough it looks pretty robbust, it has now failled. Not sure if it is powersupply or a more serious issue.
The fan used to be quite noisy as well.
I'm not happy!
Pros: High capacity
network attached
Cons: noisy fan
sluggish to come out of stand-by
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anonyous
12/11/2006, 03:03 AM
rating
9/10
Drive seems pretty stable and the firmware update process is straight forward. The network speeds are definitely adequate (Guess what, it IS going to be slower then a USB drive). The OpenMMS.org firmware allows you to turn this little appliance into a full blown linux server if you like.
Pros: -Open source firmware available
-Good stability
-Simple configuration
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25/04/2006, 04:44 AM
FAR TOO SLOW TO ACCESS DATA
When is someone going to make a proper network drive that doesn't take hours to search through for Mac?? Surely there should be a way of journalling the drive? Far too slow..
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Alec
20/10/2005, 03:44 PM
It is great on a network with a variety of Windows Operating Systems
The only issue I have with the drive is that it is much slower than my Lacie Extreme USB drive.
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pkh
23/07/2005, 10:33 AM
Some positive update after use
Time stamp bug is fixed by firmware update. Maxtor is great with real prompt email support.
I test it with 2 usb drives attached and it works perfectly with NTFS format drive as well, something I thought not possible before.
Also I ran an extreme test using 3 wireless computer (2 laptops and 1 desktop) playing 3 different DVD stored in Maxtor's own hard disk. They all run perfectly with no hicup at all. This is a major surprise to me.
The support of double-byte fonts is also seemless. Something I thought Buffalo can't do according to cnet's review. All these make Maxtor a perfect 10 winner with no competition.
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pkh
05/06/2005, 08:32 PM
This is exactly want I dream of in a NAS
I nearly bought the Linksys or Buffalo. Lucky I hold off after reading the review in Cnet. They have slow transfer rate and only accept Linux format USB drive. The Buffalo is expensive for a mere 160GB. The Linksys is not cheap either after you add an external 300GB USB drive. I need no fancy stuff just plain shared network storage space with password control. It is fast enough not just for music but WMVHD as well. No stutter whatsoever. Share DVD is a piece of cake (This is the main purpose I want a NAS). Slight stutter only in extreme conditions like playing 1080P WMVHD with wireless notebook. I don't know the transfer rate but if it can do High-def files it just can't be slow. The power to attach a Fat32 USB drive is way better than its competition also (plug and play my USB2 2.5" pocket drive and 128Mb thumbdrive right away). And the rrp is much lower than the 160GB Buffalo here in Australia. The support of Asian double-byte font is a must have for me also. I just simply love it.
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13/04/2005, 03:36 AM
SLOOOWWWWWWW
I got this drive to use as back up for music / data. Accessing or copying files to this drive over a network is the slowest thing I have tried to do in a very long time. It is just not a realistic solution for transfering or accessing data. Everthing I attempt on this thing takes much longer than it should. For example, deleting an empty folder (NO DATA!)takes about 20 seconds and you can't use explorer on your computer because it makes everything else lag.
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