Should I buy Maxtor Shared Storage Plus - 300GB ??

Question

Would greatly appreciate your advice. I know nothing about network storage. Have just stumbled across it when looking for an external HD 250-300 GB. From the Discussion, it sounds tricky but Maxtor's publicity says it is Mac-friendly. MacMall has them now available.
Is it really good and Mac-friendly???
My iMac has lots of HD capacity but the iCube 20 GB HD is packed. I would like to network them and have my assistant work simultaneously with me on the iCube.
I have a 2Wire DSL router from SBC connected by Ethernet cable to the iCube and by wi-fi to the iMac. Will the Maxtor storage be connected by Ethernet to the router?
First, the network storage would be my backup. Can I boot from it too?
I understand both users can share documents. This will allow me to off-load lots of stuff from the iCube. Can both users work simultaneously on a Word or Excel document?
Can both users share the same e-mail database (Entourage or Mail) simultanelously??
Is it really better for me than an external HD? I guess, depends on the capability to work simultaneously.
Thanks for your comments,
iMac G5 250 GB   Mac OS X (10.4.4)   iCube iBook

Answer 1

Maxtor's publicity says it is Mac-friendly
I don't see anything on their site that mentions the word 'Mac', friendly or not.
That doesn't mean you can't use it - it may well be that it only implemented Windows-based file sharing protocols (e.g. SMB), but the Mac can act as an SMB client just fine, so it may not need specific Mac support.
Will the Maxtor storage be connected by Ethernet to the router?
That depends on your router and whether the router has a built-in switch or not.
Look at the back of the router and count the number of ports it has. If it's more than 2 (and at least one of them is spare) then it has a built-in switch and you should be able to plug the server into it.
If it doesn't have more than two port, or all its ports are used then you'll need an addition switch to hook everything together.
Can both users work simultaneously on a Word or Excel document?
No. Both users can open the document, but neither Word nor Excel support multiple editors/writers. The second user who opens the file will get an error and will not be able to save the document while the first user has it open.
Additionally, don't think that one user can open the file and type while the other user sees what's being written? It doesn't work that way, either (there are apps that will do this, but neither Excel nor Word do).
Can both users share the same e-mail database (Entourage or Mail) simultanelously??
Sure, if you don't mind corrupting your mail database and losing any and all mail in it (seriously: Do not try this).
I'm not aware of any mail client that supports multiple accesses to the mail database. You might be able to achieve what you want using IMAP (where the mail is stored on a mail server and can be accessed serially by multiple clients), but I don't know your goals here to know if that is sufficient.
Is it really better for me than an external HD? I guess, depends on the capability to work simultaneously.
It depends on what you want to do. If your goal is to have the second machine share some of the storage on the first it may be that your best bet is to just fire up file sharing on one machine and do it that way.
Just bear in mind that few applications support multiple accesses to the same file so no matter what approach you take you will have that limitation.