There's nothing that new about the principles of network attached storage (NAS). However, Ximeta is one of several companies offering a new pack of NAS products that are specifically targeting small and home networks, and with some success.

The 80GB model on test here (120GB and 160GB versions are available) is a case in point. Effectively, it's an external hard drive, and as simple as that. It has an 8MB cache and runs at 7,200rpm.

However, the twist here is that as well as having the option to hook it up to a PC via a USB port (thus allowing you to use it as a portable, external hard drive), the Ximeta unit can be connected directly to a network hub (supporting 100Mbps Ethernet).

For those who have a network without a dedicated server computer, this is where the product really becomes useful. By hooking it up to your hub, all machines on the network (whether wired or wireless) have access to what becomes a shared storage resource that doesn't rely on a certain machine being switched on. Great for holding a central selection of music, documents - whatever you like, in fact.

If the principle sounds strong, then fortunately the execution is as well, albeit with a couple of caveats. Housed in a sleek aluminium casing, the drive itself simply requires you to insert the power cable and your choice of connector (with all relevant cables provided in the box), and then head for a PC that you want to see the drive.

Then you need to run the setup software, input security codes found on the bottom of the physical drive itself (and depending on which codes you input, you can use the drive on a read-only or a read/write basis) and it adds itself as a local drive under My Computer. The software has to be run on each PC in the network that you want to use the drive (and you can set different permissions on different machines).

That's as tricky as the setup procedure gets, aided considerably by a good quality instruction sheet included in the package. Yet there are a couple of niggles.

First, while the drive is quiet in operation, it does get quite hot. That didn't translate into a performance hit of any kind, more a thought at the back of our mind seeing as it's likely to be permanently switched on (there's no on/off button on the drive).

Second, because of the software, this is a Windows-only solution at present, and is best suited to 2000 or XP, which may also be a restriction to some. Firewire is lacking too, and in our wireless test environment, the drive had a habit of disconnecting and reconnecting on a different drive letter, which was a mild irritant. As we write this, it's jumped from our E: drive to the L: drive in a little under an hour.

Still, this is a handy, easy-to-setup and genuinely useful solution. Extra marks too for its scaleable architecture, which allows you to add further NetDisks with supposedly no performance hit (although as we only had one of the units, we couldn't test that), that you can then aggregate into one big drive. However, we suspect that most people will simply use this as a good, solid, central storage resource for their network. They shouldn't be disappointed.

It's not without a few grumbles, but the NetDisk 80 is a useful, good value and user-friendly piece of hardware.