Cheap Wireless NAS

We were recently asked to provide a means of allowing about 25 laptops, Macs and PCs, to share some common file storage while they were at an offsite event. The concurrent access limitations of the built-in filesharing of Windows XP and Mac OS X wouldn't allow us to use one laptop as a server so we needed a better solution and preferably one that didn't involve setting up a real Windows or OS X server.

That's when I came across the iomega NAS 100d range, which provides 250GB of network attached storage (NAS). The thing that really made it the gadget of choice was the fact that it can also function as an 802.11g wireless base station or client. The laptops were all wireless equipped so we ended up driving a wireless network from the iomega box itself and everything worked very well. This excellent little piece of kit will now be a standard accessory for our offsite events.

Originally posted on The Jumbled Box, 27/9/2005

PS: I suspect the NAS 100d range has been discontinued as, while the link above works, it can't be found browsing the site. The nearest equivalent looks like the Storcenter Network Hard Drive, which provides capacities from 250GB to 500GB.