I was looking at maybe picking up a couple of these enclosures to use for machine-independent network storage, and was hoping that there might be someone here with first hand experience who could provide the good, the bad and the ugly of them based on your experiences.

This is the exact model I am considering: product link

I've used the Ximeta NetDisks that come with a hard drive already in the enclosures, but it's been a while since then. When I used them it was mostly to transfer files to them over a USB connection.

I remember using it over a network connection (to compare transfer speeds with USB) and it was really easy setting it up. Just use the CD that comes with it and then it shows up as a local drive on any network computers that have the drivers installed. I can't remember which was faster USB or a network transfer, but I do remember the network transfer on the Ximetas being much faster than transferring files to/from the big, fancy Dell NAS we had.

Not really much else to say except that they worked fine for what we needed them for.

I've got a couple of these enclosures, and they work like champs. Like Miranda's, mine started out as purchased Ximeta external USB/Network HD's, but I've since upgraded the original HD's in both units to larger sizes . I've got a 250GB HDD in the larger one (originally a 120GB HD) and a 160GB in the smaller one (originally an 80GB HD). Opening up the enclosues is a bit of a pain, but once opened, replacing the HD's is trivial.

To increase the life expectancy of my external HD's, I only power on my enclosures when I want to access them; however, they actually auto-power down incative HDs. I'm not sure whether it's the enclosure itself determining the inactivity or the driver on the PC.

One quirk I've noticed w/ the drivers in ETHERNET mode is that if you have an open file handle of any sort to pointing the external enclosure, you won't be able to gracefully "dismount" the volume until you've released the file handle(s). For me this tends to happen if I forget to close out a standard Windows Explorer disk navigation window of the HD. Once I close it though, assuming no other programs are open referencing files on the Ximeta mounted HD, I'm able to dismount (after which I power it off). Until I figured out what was preventing graceful "dismounting" from occuring, I used to only power off the Ximeta HD's after shutting down the PC.

From a performance standpoint, USB connectivity is 4.8x faster than ethernet as this model enclosure is limited to FAST (i.e. 100mbit) ethernet whereas USB 2.0 supports 480mbps. Ximeta has newer models (which I haven't yet tried) which support Gigabit Ethernet, and I intend to upgrade to those models once my LAN is fully running on GigE.

Thanks for the feedback - ended up picking up one on the cheap from a local retailer that deals mainly in overstock, closeout and freight damaged stuff. So far it works great, and there is an update to the software on their website (v 3.41, released 12/5/08) that now allows for multiple Windows-based machines to have the drive mounted with concurrent write access.