Maxtor Fusion Personal Web Server (500GB) review: Maxtor Fusion Personal Web Server (500GB)

So you return from vacation, eager to share with friends your photos and videos. You download your files to PC, and cue up your favorite photo-sharing site, perhaps Flickr or Sony ImageStation. Flipping through your pictures, the awful truth sets in: do you really want your parents to see shots of that drunken night? Should you create separate sets: one for Grandma, one for friends? But then how do you keep people from seeing all your images, once they're in? And what about all these cool videos you want to share too?

Never fear. Enter the Maxtor Fusion drive, a NAS drive with a server that lets you share files, whether photos, music, videos, or documents, by distributing a URL that leads straight back to your drive where the files reside. Friends and family see only the files you've invited them to see, saving yourself hours of uploading time. We pretty much love this product, although the price tag gives us pause: this 500GB machine costs $800. (Most NAS drives price out at $1 per gigabyte, with a small premium for media-serving or RAID capability.) Still, this is a unique product that stands out with its ease of file organization, labeling, and sharing.

If you're looking for an easy (and inexpensive) way to share files, however, the Maxtor drive may not be for you. There are free services, such as Avvenu and myFabrik, that let you share and distribute various file types while also helping you control who sees what. But if you're in the market for a robust device that lets you store, organize, and share various file types--and you can stomach the investment--check out the Maxtor Fusion.

The Fusion employs the same aesthetic design as the Maxtor OneTouch III line of hard drives. It's shaped like a short section of I beam, with its sides encased in a firm, rubbery plastic that ensures a solid grip. LEDs located on the front of the drive indicate power, drive activity, and network activity. A power button, two USB ports, and a Gigabit Ethernet port sit on the back of the drive. Be aware that setting up the drive is a long process--newbies may be intimidated by a few of the steps--but Maxtor's setup and user guides are highly detailed. To start, connect the drive to an available LAN port on your router and plug in the power cable. Once it's powered up, you can insert the included installation CD into your PC to install the software. You'll be prompted to enter the drive's serial number (you should have a magnifying glass handy: the print is tiny) and to create a administrator username and password for the drive.

From here, there are a number of steps you can either complete or ignore, but skipping certain steps will prevent you from sharing files with users outside your network. You can create up to 13 additional sub-users; sub-users can access the drive and share files but can't change network settings. The rest of the setup process includes entering SMTP settings (for e-mailing a share link); providing a dynamic DNS host name if you already have one (or setting one up if you don't); and configuring port forwarding on your router, so people outside the network can access the Fusion drive. These tasks may seem daunting to anyone who's new to networking, but again, Maxtor does provide all the information you'll need. For dynamic DNS hosting, Maxtor recommends two particular providers--NoIP.com or DynDNS.org--but you should check that your router supports them. (We wasted some time setting up a host name on NoIP.com and fiddling with our router before realizing that, out of the two, our router supports only DynDNS.org.)

Once you've installed the drive correctly, you can access it in a number of ways. You can type its IP address into a browser window, or if you've installed the icon shortcuts, you can just double-click the Launch MyFabrik icon on your desktop. (The drive's software was designed by a company called Fabrik, so we'll refer to it as the Fabrik interface.) The user interface is clean and spare, almost to a fault. The meanings of some of the icons are a bit opaque, though you can easily discover their purpose by mousing over. The drive is divided into five folders: Pictures, Music, Video, Documents, and Public Site. You can't change these headings, but you can create folders and subfolders within each. Each folder also accepts all file types. For example, in one folder you can share videos and photos from a group ski trip, as well as the music you listened to on the drive up to the mountains.

There are a number of ways to import files to your Fusion drive. The most obvious way is to click on the Import button, which then prompts you to browse to each file individually. If you have a lot of files, you can import them in bulk by dragging and dropping files from the PC file manager window into a program window and clicking Import All. If your PC and the Fusion drive are on the same local area network, importing files is even easier: simply double-click the Explore MyFabrik icon on the desktop to go straight to the Fusion's folders. From here, you drag and drop files or folders straight onto the drive. The benefit of this is that it preserves your file structures and is much faster than the other method.

The Fabrik interface creates a thumbnail image for each uploaded file, a process that can take some time. You can view your folders and files in a number of different ways: by thumbnails; by large thumbnails; by date range; as a list; and as a detailed list. Double-clicking an individual file will open a small window with a preview image (you can zoom in for a better view) and fields where you can edit filename, a description, and tags. The tag feature is very handy if you have a large number of files and need to search through them quickly (the search tool will also look at the filename and description fields).

Our favorite feature of this drive is the share feature. Sharing files is simple: click on the single or multiple files or folders you want to share, click on the Share icon, and type the person's e-mail address into the empty field. An e-mail will be sent to that person, telling them that you are sharing files. This e-mail contains a link straight back to your Fusion box (this is where the dynamic DNS and port forwarding come into play). Although the individual has access to your drive, they can only see the files and folders you've invited them to see. So Grandma can peruse the pretty scenic vistas, while your college buddies can see what happened at that infamous party. (But these links are forwardable, so make sure your friends aren't mad at you!) If you'd like to share with a group, simply set up a group under the Share task and name it. Then you can choose among different groups when sharing files.

The final option is to make particular files and folders public. When you designate files as such, they are viewable by anyone who navigates to your public URL--created when you set up the dynamic DNS account and host name. (The host name is generally esoteric enough that strangers are unlikely to just stumble across your public site.) Both the individual/group share and the public site allow users to download files you've made available and to view them in slide-show format. If you're a member of a public group such as MySpace or eBay, you can use Fabrik's micro-link feature to generate a link for up to five files, whether images, sound files, or videos. Simply copy and paste the HTML snippet to your page to display photos or to stream music or video. As you're pointing back to your drive and not going through the process of uploading files, you save a good deal of time.

Through the device's two USB ports you can connect two additional USB hard drives. They can be used to access files or to back up files on the Fusion device. Only an administrator can back up the Fusion; the target USB drives must be formatted with FAT32 or VFAT file systems. (the Fusion can read rives formatted with NTSF, but it can't write to them.)

Given the premium you're paying for the Fabrik program, this drive isn't intended for simple data dumping--but you can definitely use it to do so. Over a local area network, the Fusion performed reading and writing tasks quickly. It took 9 minutes, 34 seconds to write our 5GB test folder. The drive read back the same folder in a short 10 minutes, 39 seconds.

One feature we'd like to see in future versions of this drive is a built-in photo editing utility, even if it provided only basic features such as red-eye reduction, face brightening, or cropping. Since you can access the drive directly on your network, it's not too difficult to tweak photos with a photo editor, but having basic tasks built in would make the sharing process even easier.

Maxtor supports the Fusion drive with a one-year, limited warranty. Toll-free phone support is available on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. MST. Maxtor's Web site also offers a knowledge base, guides and software updates, and an online form to email updates.