Reccomend a Network drive?

[Craigy]

I was thinking of getting a network hard drive fro a friend who's got a macbook and his partner with a PC laptop. There are a few around in the £160+ price rage, such as the 300 gb Lacie - Does anyone have any experience with these? Is the Lacie one any good, or is there a better alternative?

I assume I'd be able to plug this in to a ethernet hub/switch and access if from any point on the network, but would it have to be formatted in any particular way to enable PC and Mac read/write access?

 

[mkrishnan]

It seems like one of the big unknowns with respect to NAS's is what Time Machine will want.

NAS's come in several varieties... some can format the HD in a number of different host OS formats, so that you can have, say, a FAT32 format that both Windows and OS X can read, or a MacHFS+ or NTFS partition that will work better but only with one OS. And then there are some that use their own format, and give you no options, but by virtue of acting as a server, try to take care of this.

But it's not clear what Time Machine will need yet, AFAIK....