[big jeff]

can you create a networked harddrive that plugs directly into a 6 port dlink switch?

[chog]

They have them for sale so I take it yes. I do not know how to o this but here is one for sale.

-Link-
http://www.compuplus.com/insidepage.php3?id=1001838

[ekÆsine]

i think those devices are stupidly overpriced. for $200 you could just buy 2 internal hard disks and install them into 2 computers and share those drives over a network. that way you can either mirror your 120GB using total commander with the 'synch DIR's' option or have a total network share of 240GB.

....hmm which sounds better now? plus if you mirrored them, your disk access time is 10x faster because over a network is much slower. and with 2 disks you have redundancy, if one fails you still have the other.

[HoLoCroN]

One of the only benefits of this miny NAS (Network Storage Area) is its independence from a computer. If your computer dies, you can still access the data from other computers as long as its on the network storage device. Also, if you need to, you can just unplug it and take it to any place that has an ethernet connections, say... a friends house. What better way to share MP3's??? Or other files?

As far as using them, its easy... Plug it in and your done. You can access it by using the IP address assigned to the device. Once your initial connection, you can map a network drive on other computers to access the drive when needed.