3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Great Product but forget about Tech Support
Date of Review: Oct 16, 2004
The Bottom Line: Buy this product. Find yourself a nerd and have them install it if you cant figure it out. Once installed, you will be glad you bought this product.
Found this product in PC World and bought one a week later. I had already copied the contents of my external hard drive to my PC drive a night earlier so it would be ready for formatting. This device requires that it format your external drive to it's own format. That way, if someone disconnects your drive and connects it to another computer, they cannot access your files.
I hooked up the drive to the network and ran the software. It recognized the drive but provided no data and wouldnt let me change anything. After a couple of hours of nothing, I called Tech Support, which was clueless to the problem and told me to return the unit. However, instinct told me that the unit was fine so I kept looking until I realized two problems....First, I had plugged the unit into the wrong port of the switch. I have a switch that is plugged into the router and I had plugged the unit into a crossover port. So I plugged it into port one but the problem persisted. Then I realized that the computer running the software was updated with Windows XP SP2. So I shut down the windows firewall and everything detected fine. Once configured, I turned the firewall back on and it configured itself to allow UPnP Framework as an exception in the firewall settings. Everything works fine now.
I went to my network places and configured it to "show icons for networked UPnP devices" and I was in business. I then "mapped network drive" so the new drive would appear in "My Computer". I configured the device with a new password and now my files are safe and I can access them from any computer hooked up to the router. If I had a static IP, I could access my files over the internet. That would be way cool!
