After doing yet another upgrade on one of the systems at home.

I ended up with a 200G ide drive and no place to put it.
At the same time I find the file / print server is not being used much.

The solution turned out to be simple and only cost me $93.00

I ordered and mounted a network drive enclosure
Much the same as the USB external drive enclosure

But One ever handy difference
The enclosure includes a network card and drive controller

http://www.bixnet.com/usenwitremha.html


Just installed the old drive.
Plugged in network cable
Ran the setup / format and it is up and running.


No need to run the full system 24/7 any more.
The network drive takes care of all in house file server duties.
No more need to boot up a second system to access shared files

Just map the network drive on each system..

I ran a couple of tests today for the performance side.
Using media files ( Large photo files, MPG, and even some exe )
with 2 or 3 systems accessing the files.
I Got little or performance drop.

One short coming has arisen .
When first access the network drive with a windows xp pro (sp2) system.
The drive can be slow to respond
Causing the system screen to freeze ..

It also displayed the same lag when closing the connection ..
This was after transferring 89+ meg of files to the network drive.

At one point it acted as if the file info was being cached and had not been written to the drive yet.
The drive activity light confirmed this ..
So when shutting down a system using the drive .
You need to make sure all drive activity has finished.

In much the same way you do when writing files to a cd/rw disk

Thanks for the info Rick - looks interesting and could have a number of uses.

Your welcome..

I also found the cause of the delay/screen freeze.
it wasn't the new device.
it was one of the old hubs I had it connected to.
It ( 5 port Hub) went DOA shortly after posting the msg above.
A New 16 port switch solved that little problem..