Hotway LanDrive HD9-U2LA

An ordinary case external drive case that doubles as a DHCP server. And triples as a Samba server. And Quadruples as...

The LanDrive is essentially an external HDD enclosure constructed mainly of solid, brushed aluminium with extra plastic bits.

The installation of a 3.5" IDE hard drive is straightforward; just remove two Phillips head screws and four thumbscrews to gain access to the drive rack, plug in the internal IDE and power cables and then secure the drive in place. The only file table choice is FAT32, so file sizes exceeding 4GB are a limitation, however it does support 48-bit LBA to a theoretical maximum of 2TB.

The unit is powered by an external switching supply, but at least it is on the end of an extension lead, not an irritating brick. Once operational, the drive is plugged into a network point, and then accessed by a Web-based control panel to set up the parameters and permissions. The first step is to make sure that the drive is configured to your LAN workgroup – missing that little detail cost us about 10 minutes of pure frustration! The LanDrive can also be set-up as a DHCP server, but if it detects an existing DHCP server on the network it will automatically disable this function. As an SMB (Samba) server you can share files and folders, with the ability to set share permissions, and the FTP feature has similar flexibilities. A final nicety is the power management feature, allowing the drive to spin-down after an inactive period of your choice.

Some things just make you exclaim, ‘Oh, yeah!’, and if you get excited about home network NAS capability (as we do) then this product will certainly fire your engines.