Design & Connectivity
The Maxtor Shared Storage II 1TB looks very similar to the Maxtor OneTouch Turbo III 1TB external drive I reviewed previously here on I4U. However, the drives are very different animals with the OneTouch III only having the option to connect directly to the USB or FireWire port of your PC. The Maxtor Shared Storage II can't connect to your PC via USB 2.0 the drive is designed for direct attachment to your network via RJ45 CAT 5 cable.

Maxtor also grafted two USB ports onto the Maxtor Shared Storage II drive to allow you to connect a printer or additional USB drives for even more storage space. This means that you can use the Maxtor Shared Storage II as a print server and share one connected printer with all the computers on your network.

Internal Drives
Internally the Maxtor Shared Storage II uses dual 500 GB Maxtor SATA drives to get the 1TB capacity. Having two drives inside the housing allows you options on how you configure the Maxtor Shared Storage II. You can opt to span data across both 500 GB drives for a 1TB total capacity or you can opt to mirror data between the two 500GB drives in a RAID 1 setup. Mirroring data is great for very important data that needs extra protection.

Configuration & Installation
Configuring the Maxtor Shared Storage II was easy; you simply plug the drive into your network and turn it on. The Maxtor Shared Storage II automatically configures itself to your network. Once you install the software to all the networked PCs or Macs that will be accessing the drive you will be ready to configure the drive shares.

You can set up folders that anyone on the network can access and you can set u p individual folders that are password protected so that only authorized users can save to them or access the files. You can also limit what users can do within the folders as well by setting permissions to read only to keep changes form being made.

Once you are connected to the Maxtor Shared Storage II with the appropriate user account you will see icons for the mapped network derive in My Computer as well as on your desktop. Adding individual files to the folder assigned to your user account is very easy and can be done by simply dragging the file or folder to the icon for the Maxtor Shared Storage II on your desktop.

Saving Data to the Drive
Backups can be configured for completely automated execution. You chose the files to back up, the days to back up and the time for the back up to execute and the software handles everything else for you. If you are looking for a network drive that can stream media to your networked home theater system the Maxtor Shared Storage II can do that with an UPnPAV certified adapter.

Backing up data to the Maxtor Shared Storage II takes a bit longer on some networks than it takes to back the same data up to local drives do to having to transfer the data across the network. Ideally, you will want to set the data backups to execute at times of least network activity to speed the process up. Windows compatibility is with XP, 2000 and MCE, which means corporate users running one of the Windows server OS’ will not be able to use this drive to back up data on the server. Mac compatibility is with OS X 10.3.9 and higher.

The only issue I had during my time with the Maxtor Shared Storage II was at the initial set up where I changed the name of the drive from the default to Maxtor-shared-storage-1tb. The software allowed me to set this as the drive name, but the drive could not be found by the individual computers on the network with this name. After a bit of fiddling about I realized that, the name of the drive was the problem. After changing the name to mss the drive was recognized easily by the networked computers.