For the past couple of weeks we’ve been playing around with the new NetDrive Wireless from Martian, which the company advertises as a totally silent hard drive that connects to a home wireless network over 802.11b. With the number of home WiFi networks growing rapidly, a wireless network drive is such a perfectly obvious idea that it’s a mystery that Linksys or D-Link don’t already have their own on the market.
The Martian performs just about how you’d want it to. As advertised, it really is totally silent, unlike the distressingly loud Maxtor Firewire drive sitting on our desk at the moment. And setting it up is a breeze: you plug it in and it just works. All you need to do is run the “Map Network Drive” utility on each computer that wants to access it. It takes about ten seconds and you’ve got 120GB of storage space that anybody in the house can use to stash their MP3s and videos. The NetDrive runs a very basic file-serving operating system so that that all the computers on the network, whether PC, Mac, and Linux, can access it.
However there are a few caveats to the NetDrive Wireless. It’s expensive compared to a regular external hard drive (the 120GB model runs about $479), and about twice the size of one as well. If you’re planning to transfer really huge files or folders, you might want to bite the bullet and connect the NetDrive to your home network using its Ethernet port rather than the much-slower 802.11b, something which in some respects defeats the purpose of having a wireless hard drive in the first place. These probably aren’t big issues for most people, who will just be happy to have something reliable that makes in-home file sharing easy.
