Slashdot Mirror
Asus Launching a Wi-Fi Hard Drive
TheFoot writes "The Register reports that Asus is promising to 'change your perception on data storage'. They're talking up a hard drive enclosure capable of taking any 2.5in ATA-100 hard disk. It also contains an 802.11g adaptor and antenna, plus a pair of wired 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports. US $150 + the price of the hard drive. They've changed my perception--why did data storage just get more expensive?" Now now, this could actually be useful. tempest2i notes that there's a Macworld story as well.
This is an interesting reminder about the "network data storage device" market. Cut those things open, and there's a standard HD plus the interface hardware it takes so that the drive can be reached over the network. In fact, cut open a USB 2.0 or Firewire HD and you'll find pretty much the same thing, and the same goes for external CD or DVD drives.
So, for $150 plus the cost of whatever HD you'd like to use you can build your own "network data storage device". If you just want a HD hanging on the network, without any need for the rest of the features of a full grown file server, then this is the part you want.
This actually could be very useful. Will we all carry around wifi miniHD's in the future so we can logon to our data anywhere?
I remember when the iPod was first released a few people mentioned going into stores, plugging theirs into demo machines and taking copies of all the software they wanted in seconds.
Without the need to plug anything in, imagine what could be nicked with one of these!
erm, uh, toting that hard drive around in your backpack so you can have portable fileserver without a laptop? Thats my only idea, and a poor one at that. 2.5" disks are more rugged than their 3.5" counterparts, but not *much* more. I wouldn't want to be bouncing around everywhere with $250+ worth of fileserver plus NiMH batteries in my pocket. If you really want portable storage, a laptop isn't a whole lot bigger, and a lot more useful. Actually, now that I've read the article, the thing isn't even really portable, unless you hack a battery pack together yourself. Kinda silly premise for a product actually. Why not just make a full-blown router with hard drive? Certainly hybriding a $40 router to a $150 hard drive widget with wireless already can't be all that much more expensive. Just my $.02 Canadian.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It might be a NAS, but which protocols does it speak? NFS? Samba? FTP? DAV? Which authentication methods is it capable of? Can it authenticate against my (insert your favourite authentication service).
Anybody has any ideas?
bash$
This brings up a very interesting question. People used to theorise about what would happen if somebody left a laptop full of WiFi-shared MP3s in a coffee shop... but who needs a full laptop to do that, this makes the theoretical cost of such a device close to $200...
While the idea of an enclosure is nice, I think I'd rather spend the same amount of money on something that could be an access point, too. Netgear surprised me with their new router, the WGT634U, which offers a USB 2.0 port for attaching storage devices in addition to 108Mb turbo wi-fi. This is a trend I like.
It's not the gear, it's the functionality.
Then there's all the iPod cracking fun. "Let's see what that jogger has on his iPod..."
If you had one of these stashed in say a neighbors house with some illegal stuff on it and you got raided you could probably get away with it.. This could also be good for a close range offsite back up. Just have an agreement with a neighbor to keep a harddrive of eachothers at eachothers house in case of fire or some other disaster.
Moo!
The $150 price tag is steep, so hopefully that will go down.
But right now, I've got an almost fully wireless setup going with my 12" power book. Bluetooth mouse/keyboard, SE T610 phone for controlling iTunes, and an AirPort base station.
This could be really usefull for storing iTunes music, bittorrents, etc, and sharing it across multiple computers easily.
Um... presumably because, being external, part of the point of this is to move data between different PCs at will. Not all PCs have wireless, ergo, it is a good idea to have both options.
Read Pynchon.
Actually, this might be a fun solution for off-site data backup. Go hide one outside somewhere (preferrably in a locked, powered container) and mount a pringles can off of the antenna. Assuming no one walks off with your new drive, you've got offsite storage!
Setup reasons for a start. If it only has WiFi, and your access point has WEP enabled (and if it doesn't, why the hell not?), how is the enclosure going to get the key to connect? You're going to have to plug it into a wired LAN (or crossover cable) to allow it to get an initial IP, fire up your web browser, browse to it, set the WEP key, let it connect then remove it from the wireless LAN.
As an aside, whilst this is funky, no RAID is a drawback for me. That and my firewall at home is in transparent mode as I had a nice block of routable IP addresses that seemed more than enough 2 years ago when I just had 3 servers and a desktop. Now I have 3 servers, the xbox, the firewall, the wireless access point, 3 laptops in day to day use, another laptop which gets used by guests and if I add a NAS whammo, one IP left. It's going to be a pain to setup NAT *sigh*
Actually I've gotten appallingly bad performance when I try to copy from one 802.11 client to another over a base station (any brand). I'm not sure why, but I suspect the collision rate goes through the roof as the device being copied from saturates the link on the way to the base station, and then the base station competes with it to forward packets to the device being copied to. Either that or I'm just doing something wrong.
Anyone else successfully copied large files this way - wireless to wireless across a basic service set - with reasonable performance? I don't get anywhere near 11 Mbps, or even 2 Mbps. By contrast I get great performance between a wired peer (or the Internet) and a wireless one.
If it's the same for this hard drive kit, I can't see it working well.
That's not so unlikley. If you do most of your computing on a laptop, or a tablet, or if you have a mythTV box, network attached storage that was always available would let you shut down your big desktop for a significant energy/noise savings.
I'd love to have my a firewire-to-ethernet bridge to let my external FW drive beaccessible (albeit slowly) without crossing the room and plugging in. Plugging in the FW is still an option when copying DVD images or making backups, but if I just want to pull A file out of a backup, or access the gigs of mp3s that I moved off my laptop because I was running out of storage, why should I have to plug anything in, let alone leave an entire PC running turning money and electricity into heat while it does nothing.
I guess bluetooth isn't fast enough. But it would rule to see small form factor, low power consuming hdd's with battery built in. Then whatever devices utilizing the media off the hdd can be smaller and you can stow your mp3s, video, pictures etc. in your backpack or back pocket or something. We're not talking high performance here. I'm sure you could stream an mp3 over bluetooth with the right sized buffer. 802.11b/g seems like overkiller for a portable application.
_nfotxn
Firewall, what firewall?? (Unless, of course, its made of lead).
You just need to get close!
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Yes. It is. The fact that someone marked such a stupid question insightful is idiotic. Questions rarely provide insight and obvious questions like that never do. Anyway, enough ranting. To answer your question, I would really like one of these because I have a wireless laptop that I only plug in when i need it at my desk. Like, to plug in my ipod or my current firewire external drive. I plug it into an ethernet network in this case. But if I am on a my couch wireless, I cannot access that drive. "But wireless has such low bandwidth!", you say. I would not want to do large backups wirelessly, but lets say I want to stream a video file over it. Or perhaps have my iTunes playlist and songs on it. Its perfect for these uses. Not to mention as a central sharing point. Alas, this device is useful.
I've been waiting for one of these things for a while.
It'll let me use my pocket pc as my car MP3 player. I can have massive *wireless* storage in the boot or glove box. The bandwidth is fine for MP3 & video playback and the simplicity and tidyness of the setup makes up for the price.
what about an ipod dock, or attachement, that is a wireless adpater. think about it "update your music collection while its plugged into your cd player" that would be very cool and would help the uptake of 40 gig ipods methinks. id prefer to pay $150 for that!
Keep your WiFi HD in a vent or something. Recharge as necessary, maybe run a power line into that secret spot. If politzei raid your house and steal - i mean, confiscate everything that looks techie, you wait until they are gone and then run to someone you trust with your WiFi HD. let them copy it, and return before the bad guys return to say "ho, wait a minute, we have records here of another drive. hand it over." you gladly and apologetically give them the device knowing that (a) your data is safe and (b) anything incriminating was *totally* removed when you visiited your friend.
What do you mean "hardware alone?" It needs to run something to be able to communicate with clients and share files:
It will have a Web-based management interface through which the drive can be accessed. Files will be freely shareable, have read-access only or be restricted to password-owning users.
The info lacks details but it looks like all access and sharing will be done through a web server. How useful is that? I don't know, since the article also mentions that previous attempts by other manufacturers in this direction have failed, including what I thought was a better solution:
Sony tried with a WiFi-connected file server in early 2003. The FSV-PGX1 was a 20GB hard drive controlled by an embedded Linux system that turned it into a file-server. It could be used by up to 250 people who accessed it by CIFS, if using Windows, or NFS if using Unix/Linux. The WiFi version was 11Mbit/s 802.11b, which meant that file-server access speeds weren?t great, particularly with several people sharing it. Again, it was a light device, weighing in at 320g.
I could actually see a use for such a device for home users with multiple computers or a very small office; but I don't think it's a good idea at all. Given from what I've seen the security (or lack thereof) most people use to set up their wireless networks, this type of device will make all sensitive data directly accessible and available to everyone nearby without even needing to have any computers turned on.
Data storage that not only is seriously expensive, but far too slow for any real use. I have an 802.11G wireless network here at home and while it's fine for basic tasks like Internet access and moving small files around it's slow.
Despite claiming to be 54mbit, it really only gets 8 - 20 mbit even when I sit right next to the access point. There are a bunch of technical reasons why this is so, but the bottom line is that disk should be fast. ATA20 isn't a disk standard because people want ATA150. They'd buy ATA600 if it were possible, because disk is already the slowest part of our computers.
Making it slower is just stupid marketing guys trying to figure out how else to get rid of 15 million spare wireless chips.
A Wi-Fi hard drive can also be a security nightmare! Anyone with the right equipment (a wifi card and a decent laptop) could eavesdrop, and even modify data on-the-fly. Using encrypted filesystems is a *must* in such a case, and even then, data integrity would still be in jeopardy.
It may be possible to turn the tranceiver off, but you must trust the manufacturer that no back-door can be remotely opened.
So how do you shield such drives? TEMPEST protection is already hard enough without this...
The biggest issue here is not to stay clear of such equipment (if you have security objections), but to ensure that vanilla (non-wifi) hardware doesn't have WiFi chips you don't know anything about!
It's a bad feeling to know that your computer could (passively, thus undetected) listen to RF, and behave in strange ways. We're on the brink of hardware that could be used as spyware. A scary thought!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
...boot from it? This would be an interesting option to explore... You could have a completely mobile, moduluar computer...You want to change hard drives, or have a faster CPU, no sweat -- connect to a different component.
One of the primary design constraints for home theatre PCs is that they need to be absolutely silent. Since hard drives can be noisy, keeping the number of drives in your system to a minimum should be important. Many people (myself included) use networked fileservers to serve media to their HTPCs.
These little boxes seem like just the ticket. Imagine a diskless HTPC. All that you would need to do is boot it over the network and mount the drive in the Asus enclosure as your root filesystem. If you were to use a Via C3-based motherboard and a power supply with passive cooling, you could then have an HTPC with no moving parts and thus, totally silent.
Can we get this in a CD drive? I wish there was a way to have a "remote" cd drive. That is the only thing holding me back from tossing my machine in the closet. I can get a 25 foot KVM cable, but, when I want to play a game (no-cd "fixes" aside), I have to go over there and pop in the CD. Can I have a CD drive sitting on my desk with the machine itself sitting in the closet?
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Mini-itx motherboard in a portable enclosure, although I might switch it down to a Nano-itx now that they're becoming available.
250gig 3.5" hard drive instead of a 2.5 mainly cause they're half the price and hold twice the storage.
CD-RW
802.11g
FM audio transmitter
Small battery pack. It only needs to run everything for 10 minutes.
12-volt Power Supply
No screen; No keyboard
The idea of this is a portable storage / mp3 player. All controls are through it's Apache server, so I connect to it from a PDA or a laptop with a wireless card. It runs off 12 volts, so you can use it anywhere. As long as you can keep it within a few hundred feet of you you can use it.
The original idea was for an MP3 player for my truck that I didn't have to dedicated to it or physically install. All I have to do, is carry it out of the house and plug it into a cigarette lighter. The battery keeps it from having to reboot when I move it from outlet to outlet. a 15 volt wall-wart and my auto-cigarette lighter adapter has enough voltage to run it and keep the battery topped off. It broadcasts to a nearby FM receiver or can stream the audio, although sometimes I just connect to the MP3 library over Samba. It automatically synchronizes with my home network when it's in range.
When I'm at work, I just leave it in the truck and I've got enough range to connect to the FM headset and PDA I carry with me. When I'm at the gym, I park close to the building and queue up a long playlist before I leave it and the PDA in the truck. The best part of the whole thing is that it's inconspicuous. I don't have to leave an expensive looking gadget sitting in it all the time. I built it into a small, cheap looking plastic toolbox, so I can carry it anywhere without anybody paying any attention to it.
It keeps growing. I'm currently experimenting with adding moving-map GPS using a USB GPS receiver. My big problem there, is updating the display on the PDA properly. I'd also like to synchronize my email / contacts / calendar / notes / tasks to it. It's an easy way to transfer large files back-and-forth between work and home and wherever else I happen to need them.
I'm also considering with adding a second wireless adapter to it. The primary that controls it is highly secure and doesn't broadcast. The second one would be completely open and would scan for access-points. Partly so it could automatically connect to the net as I was driving around. Partly so I could use it as a gateway to the net from the PDA.
I'd really like to get it all down to something I could actually wear on my belt. I could already get away with a smaller version if I ditched the CD drive, went to an embedded motherboard, switched to a small HD, and added batteries. It this point, it wouldn't be as powerful and would be twice the price. Maybe in a couple years...
Toys...