USB 2.0 hard disks are a convenient way of backing up your data, but if you want to share the files with other computers over a small office or home network they're not ideal. You'll need to leave a host PC on all the time, or physically move the disk around from machine to machine. But Linksys has an alternative. The Network Storage Link (NSL) takes a USB 2.0 hard disk or flash drive and puts it on the network.

The NSL is a tiny device, with a quartet of status lights on the front and two USB 2.0 ports plus Ethernet and power plugs on the back. It supports two disks, or one disk and a USB flash drive. Once the NSL is plugged into the network and your storage devices are plugged into its USB ports, turn on the device and leave it to boot. Next, the installation CD is required to load the setup utility. This searches the network for NSL devices, and gives you the option to configure any it finds. Once you've chosen between manual IP or automatic allocation via DHCP, the utility asks if you want to format the attached storage devices. This must be performed to make them usable.
NSL-attached drives should then appear in My Network Places automatically, ready to receive data. By default, the NSL is placed in a workgroup called Workgroup, but this can be changed. Aside from public space, it's possible to set up private folders that require a password to access. They're still visible to others, but are rendered inaccessible.

As Linksys has a partnership with Maxtor, we used the latter's 160GB OneTouch external hard disk for testing. A folder containing 773MB of mixed files took 191 seconds to copy from a desktop PC to the NSL-attached Maxtor, and 183 seconds to copy back, for a rather poor 4MB/sec and 4.2MB/sec respectively. This is much less than you'd expect for a locally attached USB 2.0 disk or a fully fledged file server, but it's just about acceptable for data backup or sharing MP3s and DivX movies.

There's one huge catch with the Network Storage Link, however - it uses its own proprietary disk format. So you can't take the USB 2.0 disk or flash drive off and connect it to a PC directly - the PC won't recognise the format. You can't hot-plug devices, either. Flash drives need manual unmounting via a utility, and the NSL needs to be powered down to remove or attach a USB 2.0 hard disk. These limitations take the Linksys Network Storage Link from being a brilliant device to a merely useful one.