Snap! Server
I
first read about the Snap!
Server networkable hard drives a few years ago. I was very skeptical at
first, as I didn't believe that you could efficiently use these devices on a
network. It seemed to me that a network was just too slow, and I thought it
would interfere with other network access.
I kept looking at the reviews, however, and after a while decided to try one out myself. What finally convinced me that this product might be worth a try was the fact that I needed storage which my wife and I could share among our several computer systems. I suppose I could have just bought another cheap computer with a large hard drive, but I didn't want to deal with an operating system, applications, virus protection, firewalls or long installation times. On top of that, we live in an apartment and space is at a premium, so we didn't want to clutter up the place with yet another computer and it's associated UPS, monitor, keyboard, mouse and workspace.
At the time the Snap! server was a bit expensive, but they have come down greatly in price in the three years since I purchased my first one. Still, the price per megabyte is several times higher than simply adding a disk to an existing computer system.
However, the convenience made this a wonderful purchase for us. You see, the server works exactly as advertised. We received it, took it out of the box, set it on a table, plugged it into the network and turned it on. We then attached to the server with Internet Explorer, took about ten minutes to configure a few directories and settings, and we were finished.
Speed was not a problem, and the drive has been trouble-free for over three years now. In fact, we were so happy that we purchased a second drive a year later, giving us a total of 120 gigabytes of networked storage, accessible to any computer on our small home LAN.
How do we get to the data? We map to it as a standard Windows 2000 (or XP) shared drive, or we can access via Internet Explorer (or any other browser) as a web site. In the later mode, the server displays things as folders full of files, unless there is an index.htm document. In that case, the index is displayed in the browser as an HTML document.
Anyway, as should be obvious by now, I would highly recommend this device for someone who has several computers which need to share data.