If you have an external hard disk that you'd like to share over a network, Linksys' Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives could be the answer. It's the same size as a paperback book, connects to a network via its Fast Ethernet Port and has two USB2 ports for external hard disks or flash drives.
The Network Storage Link broadcasts its presence on the network using Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). As long as you have Windows Me or above with the UPnP service enabled, you'll be able to double-click on the icon that appears in My Network Places to access the product's management web page. Connecting storage devices is as simple as plugging them into one of the USB2 ports. Unfortunately, the Network Storage Link insists on reformatting hard disks using the Linux ext3 format, which means you can no longer access them by plugging them directly into your Windows PC. Flash drives, however, retain their FAT32 format.
The Network Storage Link can't act as an FTP server. You can access the contents of your shared drives over the internet using your web browser, but you have to set up port forwarding on your internet router. The documentation barely mentions this feature and provides no help in setting it up. You can't password-protect your data, either, which is a big security hole, although it is write-protected so the data cannot be altered. Thankfully, setting up varying levels of access to folders for different users is possible for the local network. You can also enforce usage quotas to ensure no-one hogs all the storage space with their files.
Scheduling backups of data on one hard disk to another is easy to set up. You can't choose which folders and files to back up, though. After your initial backup, you can choose to synchronise just those files that have been changed, which will make future backups much quicker.
Data access performance depends on the speed of your network and USB hard disk. We connected a 300GB Buffalo external hard disk to the Network Storage Link and found reading and writing both small and large files very slow. Copying a 4.5GB DVD image to the hard disk took almost half an hour. Watching a movie over the network was also frustrating; there was frequent stuttering during fast-paced action sequences.
If your storage needs are undemanding and you have a spare USB hard disk, the Network Storage Link is an inexpensive way to put that storage on your network. But reading and writing data is slow and the internet access feature is poorly documented and insecure. If you have a few spare internal PATA hard disks instead of external USB disks, you can use them with Netgear's SC101 (below). Its data access speeds are faster and it has RAID capabilities. If you want to access your external USB hard disks over your network, Maxtor's Shared Storage Plus comes with its own hard disk and doesn't reformat your USB storage.
10/100Mbit/s network connection, two USB2 portsAuthor: Alan Lu
Linksys Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives