Maxtor Shared Storage II 1Terabyte Network Hard Drive

Configuration:

To backup and restore your information, the EasyManage software has two icons, one for each operation. It is literally a few clicks and you’re set to go. To backup, the program asked me if I wanted to set an automatic backup day of the week or if I was just doing it once. Scheduled backups are always nice because it ensures your information will be up to date and current if anything does happen to your computer. I selected to back up roughly 100GB of information and I told it to only backup this one time.

Instead of restoring, I manually dragged and dropped my data back onto my computer after I reformatted my hard drive and it worked flawlessly. But the restore feature did just that when I used the option, so I was glad that it was very easy to do.

The one thing you might be wondering about is how to set up the RAID 1 option. To do this, you’ll have to go back into the browser menu and they have an option that tells you your options. By default, you are set on “Spanning” which is just a normal hard drive. You can set it on RAID 1, which is mirroring, but you only have 500GB of space if you do it that way because inside the box are two 500GB hard drives optimized for mirroring.

The drive is setup now, and to set it up on other computers you just have to install the EasyManage software and connect to the designated account to have their privileges. I made a family folder on each of the computers so that everyone can use the folder for anything. Both my parents and I each made a backup folder to store important information.

The other thing I wanted to do was hook my TiVo up to the drive so that I could access it from the TiVo and be able to watch my movies and listen to music with the TiVo. It was actually rather difficult because I had to download the TiVoServer program and I had to enter in the IP address of the drive into the TiVo so that I could find it. I had some difficulties getting the TiVo to find the drive but once it did, it was a breeze.

Specifications: