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The fact that is has a print server and made wireless printing possible for me long before my friends ever heard of it was a big plus. If I could get this exact product with 500GB or 1TB, I would jump at it. I bought this item a couple of years ago and am about to outgrow it. So far I can't find anything as good with more memory. I have upgraded through 2 PCs and have a home network with 3 laptops (kids), and I've only ever needed this external network hard drive.
The LINUX kernel provides a basic level of security and privacy (username and password) so everyone has their own personal folder. Setup was fast and easy and the drive operates cool and fast. I've had this drive for over 6 months and it's been FABULOUS. I've attached my Canon USB printer to it and it works great. Sharing the printer is just like sharing any other network resouce, but since I never turn the WD drive or my wireless router off, the shared drive and my printer are always available from any computer on my LAN.
Just got this drive setup for drive letter access on 2 computers and it was a breeze. Software was super simple, but has enough functionality to do whatever you could probably want to do with it.
Even the wife and kid have their own share folders they can get to from anywhere. File transfers to and from the drive itself are fast enough for me to believe that the speed is limited to the capabilities of my in-home wireless network, not the drive. I bought a Western Digital WDXE1600JBN 160GB Net Center External Hard Drive several weeks ago and it is a breeze to use. I have since added two more computers to my home network and installing the provided software was not even necessary - the folders i had previously created on the WDXE1600JBN automatically appeared under My Network Places. The original reason for getting the drive was to serve as a backup and transfer device for data I had on two Win98SE machines, but using it has been so easy it is now used for file sharing across all machines.
4 stars due to speed limitations I have 4 PCs. I haven't tried to connect a printer off of it yet but that's next.The drive is not lightning fast (didn't expect it to be) since it's competing for network resources with your other network devices but performance is acceptible. So pleased with this product, I'm ordering a 250GB version as well. The claim of cool operation is true. I've had the drive for 2 weeks now, have never turned it off and it remains cool to the touch unlike a lot of external USB drives. The setup was as fast as connecting the drive to the network, powering it up and installing the software on each PC.
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