SmallNetBuilder

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

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.