myshare

The Hammer Storage myshare is a plug-n-play NAS appliance targeted to consumer, SOHO, or small business (or departmental) usages. The appliance ships with the user's choice of hard drive capacities, ranging from a total of 320 GB to 2 TB of raw storage space on two SATA II drives. All but the 2 TB model are available now; the vendor lists the 2 TB model (two 1 TB SATA II drives) as expected to be available in August of 2007.

The appliance is deployed by plugging into an available port of the network router or switch. A single Gig Ethernet (10/100/1000) port facilitates this connection. No software needs to be installed on the individual PCs in order to connect to and use the drive; communications between the PCs and the myshare are via CIFS/SMB or NFS. A one year warranty is included in the purchase price.

The dual disk drives of the myshare support RAID data protection at levels 0, 1, or JBOD configurations. The drives themselves are 3.5 inch 7200 RPM SATA II offerings, with hardware buffer (cache) sizes of 8 MB or better.

The drive can be integrated into the network with a dynamic (via built-in DHCP support) or static IP address, and support for Active Directory enables it to leverage domain-based authentications. Support for user and group permission settings is included, as is support for file-based access control lists.

In addition to being accessed from local PCs via CIFS/NFS, the myshare can also be accessed from remote locations over the Internet via standard HTTP/HTTPS or FTP communications. Folders can be shared selectively, and the vendor states that the box is preconfigured with both drives and folders for immediate use.

Other features of the appliance include dual USB 2.0 ports for the attachment of a network accessible printer or external drive, and support for E-mail, SNMP, or syslog-based notifications. The box ships with drives, an external power supply, and network cable.

All but the 2 TB model are available now. The 1 TB myshare is priced at $499 (MSRP). Contact Hammer Storage for further information.

Hammer Storage is a division of Bell Microproducts Inc.