Cheap network hard disks,

[ffutures]

Don't know if it's of interest, but SVP will be selling these network hard disk enclosures at £19.49 on Monday. Very tempted to give one a try, since the one I use intermittently hangs, but I have a LOT of stuff on it and don't know if it will be possible to transfer the hard disk without wiping it.

Looking at the description, does it seem likely that it will work with a Mac without problems?

Comments

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Firstly you have been able to buy enclosures for around 25 quid for ages. This is different because it is netwrok enabled. Do you really need it to be?

Secondly the manual explicitly says the windows versions it is compatible with, and does not seem to mention Mac OS X.

The cheap network enclosure I have (somewhere) does not use samba or NFS, but some proprietary network protocol. This looks like it uses samba. It *should* be ok for a very small office, but I would be prepared for it to not work. 20 quid wasted isnt too bad.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I already have a network drive - the thing is that it seems to hang occasionally but I have it set to power down when not in use to prevent overheating. I have no idea if this will work any better, it may be the same motherboard - I think that a lot of the smaller drives use the same electronics - but it looks to have a cooling fan which might allow me to run it continually.

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

The user manual says it works with a FAT32 formatted disk. That's fine with Macs provided you can live with the 4GB maximum file size.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

What I mean is that there's a type of network storage (NAS?) that won't work with Macs because you need a device driver for it. It looks like this one is OK though. File size isn't a problem, I doubt I'll go over 500mb any time soon.

[ckd]

Samba will work; you just need to connect to smb://ip.ad.dr.ess in the Finder. As long as you can configure it with something like a web browser rather than a custom app, it should be fine.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Looks like it - I'm pretty sure it's the same chipset as the one I have, all of the screens look the same, but mine doesn't have a fan.