|
Internal
Details Opening up the box reveals a very
simple design with low parts count. To the left of
Figure 2 is the bottom cover with its 1
inch fan that makes more racket than my HP Desktop
(!) which I found very tiring.
Just as annoying is that this little noisemaker
doesn't appear to be doing its job. The Office
gets warmer than you'd expect during operation,
with the heat coming from the Western Digital
Caviar WD2500 Enhanced IDE drive.
Figure 2: The
innards
(click on the image for a larger
view)
A look at the Office's main board
(Figure 3) shows that there's not much else
to get warm and also the key to NDAS devices' low
cost as compared to NAS devices, i.e there's no
CPU, flash or memory to be found!
Figure 3: Main
board
(click on the image for a larger
view)
Everything is handled by a XIMETA
ND123 chip, supported by a Prolific Technology
PL-2507 Hi-Speed USB to IDE Bridge
Controller to handle the USB 2.0 interface and Admtek ADM6999 9-port
10/100 Mbps TX/FX switch for the Ethernet
ports.
Setup and
Administration
Setup and use haven't changed from my original
review except that multiple Win 2000 and
XP users now can have read / write access. MacOS
X, Linux Red Hat 8 & 9 and Win98SE / ME / CE
users are now supported, too, but only in the old
single user write mode. The price you'll pay for
using a mixture of OSes, by the way, is
that Win XP / 2000 users must also fall back to
using single-user write mode.
The automatic connection detection worked fine
when I switched between Ethernet and USB 2
connection to my WinXP Home system. Also worthy of
note is that the Office takes under 10 seconds to
go from power on to available. There's also no
shutdown procedure—you just flip the power switch
to shut it off when the drive is idle.
| 
.gif){kind=tracking}
.gif){kind=tracking}
.gif){kind=small}
.gif){kind=small}
