In terms of the exterior design, the drive looks very similar to all other Maxtor external hard drives. Silver gray case is made of aluminum, which is ore reliable than plastic. The device can be set vertically and horizontally, it doesn’t affect its operational parameters. It is supplied with a special stand holding it firmly in vertical position. The Power On button on the front panel is combined with the status LED. There is also a thin metal grid on the front panel of the drive intended to provide better cooling of the HDD inside. The back panel of the case carries a power supply connector, an RJ-45 network port, a fan and two USB ports.

Now let’s take a closer look at the technical features of the drive we have here. The network storage solutions family discussed consists of two models: one with 200GB storage capacity (the one we had in our lab) and one with 300GB storage capacity. The buffer is 8MB big (16MB for the 300GB model), and the spindle rotation speed is 7,200rpm. The manufacturer claims that the average seek time equals 9ms max. Ethernet 100Base-T/10Base-T network interface is far not the top of the line network interface anymore gives us some reason to believe that Maxtor is trying to create a sort of artificial marketing here, so that the next generation model coming out later could differ from the current one only by the Gigabit network controller. The availability of two USB 2.0 ports allows connecting two printers or two external storage devices (or a one-of-each combination) to our Shared Storage Drive. The solution works normally in the room temperature between 5 and 35^oC. Its size is relatively small: 41x140x271mm with the weight of only 1.7kg.

Besides the vertical stand mentioned above, the drive is also supplied with the external PSU and a power cable, interface cable, user’s manual and warranty agreement.

The drive is currently selling for about $300.

Testbed and Methods

We tested this solution with our brand name FC-Test 1.0 utility. You can read more about this testing tool in our article called X-bit's FC-Test 1.0 or "System Rebooted".

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard;
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA-307015 15GB host HDD;
• Radeon 7000 graphics card;
• 256MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM;
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4.

During our tests we connected the device to the 3com controller integrated onto the mainboard.