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Wireless Hard Drives...

P

PowerMacMan

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 17, 2004
254
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Chicago, Illinois
If hard-drive maker Maxtor and networking company Linksys have their way, your external hard drive is about to become very external.

On Tuesday, the companies announced a partnership featuring a $99 Linksys device that lets an external hard drive connect to a wireless router, allowing PCs to tap into the storage and share files without any physical link to the drive.

The joint effort is geared toward small offices and homes. The latter is a crowded market, overflowing with companies pitching home-networking technology. Maxtor and Linksys--a Cisco Systems unit--are marketing products together and tout a common set of instructions for tying drives to routers with what's dubbed the "Linksys Network Storage Link."

The Linksys Network Storage Link connects to an external hard drive through one of two USB ports and includes a file management system, the companies said. It is designed to work with a wired or wireless network, and to work with other external drives apart from Maxtor products.

Source

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This looks awesome, it would be so much easier to share files without actually having the actual computers linked in any way... :eek: :D

I like this!
 
I'll wait until they do it with wireless Firewire. While 802.11g is okay, I think that I just couldn't get used to the slower speed. I like my Firewire drive.

Although...a drive like this incorporated with Airport Express and AirTunes, would be great for keeping all my music off my main drive.
 
kgarner said:
I'll wait until they do it with wireless Firewire. While 802.11g is okay, I think that I just couldn't get used to the slower speed.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure that Wireless Firewire isn't all that much faster than 802.11g. I think it's somewhere in the 50-60Mbps range. It's nowhere near even 400Mbps wired Firewire speeds. AFAIK.

And, yeah, it'd seem slow for some things, and it seems like it'd be easy enough to mount a drive physically on one computer and access it from everywhere (but that system would always need to be on), but it might be nice to have an always-on wireless drive. If - if - it could be secure.
 
Good idea in theory, but in reality, what if your wireless connection drops out? Then you lose access to all your files? I don't think most people will go for that.
 
michaelrjohnson said:
Good idea in theory, but in reality, what if your wireless connection drops out? Then you lose access to all your files? I don't think most people will go for that.
Click to expand...

Well then it'll probably have a usb/firewire cable cord that you can hook up to your computer in case of network failure.
 
jsw said:
I'm pretty sure that Wireless Firewire isn't all that much faster than 802.11g. I think it's somewhere in the 50-60Mbps range. It's nowhere near even 400Mbps wired Firewire speeds. AFAIK.
Click to expand...

That's what I thought at first too. But, according to this article they plan for it to be 100 Mbps initially and then upgraded to 200 and then 400 Mbps. Unfortunately, thhose speeds or only within a 10 meter range.
 
Sure sure.. external data storage... what a bore. This is just the amount of innovation I would expect from maxtor and linksys. What I really want is internal storage... like, inside my arm.

Or, at the very least, I want micro drives that are wirleless that I can carry in my pocket.
 
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