It’s a little on the pricey side, but the weighty and solid design of Maxtor’s Shared Storage II certainly makes you feel as though your data is being well protected.

Before you can use the Shared Storage II drive you need to create at least one user account. You can also create separate user accounts for each additional person who has access to your network.

Each user account can create ‘public’ folders that are shared with other users, and ‘private’ folders that can be protected by a password. This means you can share files with other people on the network while still maintaining security for other files you may want to keep private and safe.

We like the flexibility that this approach to file management provides, although the Windows version of the Easymanage software did seem to have one or two rough edges. Our first attempt at creating a user account on our PC gave us an error message saying “network path could not be found”, even though a Mac on our network had already located the drive and mounted the public folders for that account on its desktop.

We had to repeat the setup process on the PC to gain access to our user account. Fortunately, that problem didn’t recur after the initial installation.

Also, like most of its rivals, Maxtor does a poor job of its documentation. A number of features – such as the ‘Drag and sort’ option, which attempts to sort files automatically as you copy them on to the drive – are poorly explained and we struggled to understand how they work.

This article is part of a group test of network-attached devices.
See also
Adaptec Snap Server 110
Buffalo Linkstation Multimedia Home Server
Buffalo Terastation Home Server
Freecom Storage Gateway WLAN
Iomega Storcenter Network Hard Drive
La Cie Ethernet Disk Mini
Linksys EFG120
Plextor PX-EH25L
Western Digital Netcenter 500
Living with NAS
DIY NAS

The table of features can be read via our pdf download.