Due to our imminent new arrival our old desktop PC has become homeless. It’s been turfed out of it’s previous home by Isla who has moved from the nursery to what was the spare room.
The poor old desktop is currently squatting on the coffee table in the lounge, with it’s 19′ CRT monitor and incredibly noisy fan it’s living on borrowed time.Last weekend we went out and bought a new laptop for Laura to use so we can retire the it.
I wanted to find an easy way for us to share our photos and music on the network so after considering various options I finally decided to order a 400GB Freecom External SL Network Hard Drive. There where two main reasons for this: First, at 400GB I reckon it’ll take me quite a while to fill, and secondly you can use it as a network drive or a USB drive which I hoping means I’ll be able to use it for video editing when directly attached to my laptop.
Yesterday My new drive arrived. More or less as soon as I got home I plugged it in to the network and switched it on.
The first thing I noticed is it’s pretty noisy. Admittedly not as noisy as the desktop, but too noisy to have running in the lounge all the time, so I’ll have to find a better home for it.
Setting up the PCs so that they could access the drive was fairly straightforward. Fist you install the drive administration software and reboot the PC. Once the PC restarts you open up the “Classic SL Network Drive Administrator Tool” and add the details of your drive. This is really straight forward; First off you can choose a name for your drive, then you enter the 20-digit Classic SL Network Drive ID located on the bottom of your Classic SL Network Drive and finally the “Write Key” assuming you want to be able to write to the network drive. The PC detects the drive and installs the required drivers and that’s it. The freecom drive appears as a local drive in “My Computer” in my case it’s the “E:/” drive.
So Far I’m impressed. pulling photos across the wireless network is a bit slower than accessing them from the local disc, and I suppose that could become irritating, but there’s always the option of plugging the laptop into the router with an Ethernet cable, or using USB to attach the drive directly to the PC.