When I got my new 17"PB I thought I'd make full use of it's wireless capabilities - something that I absolutely love (being a child of the 70's, I still enjoy using a TV remote control...)
The Problem
Thing is, I've got about 1500 CDs and wanted to digitise them so I could put the CDs themselves in storage and just use a large hard drive to play them through iTunes. But that would mean having a wire permanently connected to my PB, which looks quite crap as I'm using the iCurve stand and, more importantly, takes up a USB or firewire port. So I figured that the best thing would be to get a network drive.
The Solution
I had a look around, and found that most network drives were really expensive and almost gave up hope, until I found Ximeta. Basically, they sell drives called NetDisk that you can hang off the back of a router / hub with an ethernet cable to access over a network (it also has a USB port if you want to link it directly). I've got a Netgear DG834G router (basically an Airport Extreme base station with a few extra ethernet ports and no USB port), so all I had to do was to hang the drive off the back of the router, install the driver software on my PB and I had a wireless network drive. Then I simply changed my iTunes folder location to the new drive and digitised all my music (75Gb and counting...) onto that drive.
Now I have my laptop on my desk accessing the music files on the NetDisk wirelessly, and playing them out through Airport Express to my stereo, meaning no ugly cables, but plenty of capacity.
Mmmm. Wireless.
Niggles
One small problem that I have with it is that occasionally (once every couple of days) the drive disappears and reappears quickly, which can make iTunes hiccup (and you get an annoying "Device removed" message) - the latest drivers were the first to support AirPort, so I guess that should stabilise with the next release of the OSX drivers, as should multi-user access. It also occasionally struggles for some unknown reason when renaming tracks etc. (I have iTunes set to keep my files organised, so it actually has to perform operations on it). One last thing - I've formatted it as a Mac OSX drive, so Windows can't see it. To format it so that both Window and Mac can see it requires that you format a series of 32Gb FAT partitions, which would be a pain - much better to use it with Mac only or Windows only (NTFS) accessing it.
Summary
So, all round, a very nice solution for someone who doesn't want to do this on a network with lots of people, and hopefully even that should change pretty soon...
Ximeta NetDisk 250Gb
http://www.ximeta.com/products/network_drives/netdisk/index.php
Latest Ximeta OSX Drivers
http://www.ximeta.com/support/downloads/mac_osx/index.php
Where to buy
I bought mine at http://www.westcoast.co.uk/ (search for "ximeta"). Their list price is £224.67 (approx $400 / 330) and although they're wholesalers they still sold me a single one at a discount (can't remember how much now I'm afraid).
The Problem
Thing is, I've got about 1500 CDs and wanted to digitise them so I could put the CDs themselves in storage and just use a large hard drive to play them through iTunes. But that would mean having a wire permanently connected to my PB, which looks quite crap as I'm using the iCurve stand and, more importantly, takes up a USB or firewire port. So I figured that the best thing would be to get a network drive.
The Solution
I had a look around, and found that most network drives were really expensive and almost gave up hope, until I found Ximeta. Basically, they sell drives called NetDisk that you can hang off the back of a router / hub with an ethernet cable to access over a network (it also has a USB port if you want to link it directly). I've got a Netgear DG834G router (basically an Airport Extreme base station with a few extra ethernet ports and no USB port), so all I had to do was to hang the drive off the back of the router, install the driver software on my PB and I had a wireless network drive. Then I simply changed my iTunes folder location to the new drive and digitised all my music (75Gb and counting...) onto that drive.
Now I have my laptop on my desk accessing the music files on the NetDisk wirelessly, and playing them out through Airport Express to my stereo, meaning no ugly cables, but plenty of capacity.
Mmmm. Wireless.
Niggles
One small problem that I have with it is that occasionally (once every couple of days) the drive disappears and reappears quickly, which can make iTunes hiccup (and you get an annoying "Device removed" message) - the latest drivers were the first to support AirPort, so I guess that should stabilise with the next release of the OSX drivers, as should multi-user access. It also occasionally struggles for some unknown reason when renaming tracks etc. (I have iTunes set to keep my files organised, so it actually has to perform operations on it). One last thing - I've formatted it as a Mac OSX drive, so Windows can't see it. To format it so that both Window and Mac can see it requires that you format a series of 32Gb FAT partitions, which would be a pain - much better to use it with Mac only or Windows only (NTFS) accessing it.
Summary
So, all round, a very nice solution for someone who doesn't want to do this on a network with lots of people, and hopefully even that should change pretty soon...
Ximeta NetDisk 250Gb
http://www.ximeta.com/products/network_drives/netdisk/index.php
Latest Ximeta OSX Drivers
http://www.ximeta.com/support/downloads/mac_osx/index.php
Where to buy
I bought mine at http://www.westcoast.co.uk/ (search for "ximeta"). Their list price is £224.67 (approx $400 / 330) and although they're wholesalers they still sold me a single one at a discount (can't remember how much now I'm afraid).