Maxtor’s Shared Storage II emerged victorious from the NAS group test in our April 2007 issue and, remarkably, it’s still available to buy. The burning question is whether it can still cling to the top spot.

Back then, the 500GB model would have cost $595, but now the 2TB version costs just $639. And with two 1TB drives in-situ, the Maxtor is capable of configuring the drives in a RAID0 or RAID1 array. However, the sealed unit means replacing faulty drives requires the unit to be returned to Maxtor.

Two USB ports at the rear support the sharing of both printers and storage, and the Maxtor’s contents can also be easily backed up to an external hard drive.

Performance looks decidedly middle-of-the-road against today’s competition. Reading and writing large files saw the Shared Storage II manage a competent 19MB/sec for the former and 16MB/sec for the latter, while taxing the drive with small files saw the figures fall to 17MB/sec and 11MB/sec respectively.

There’s a UPnP media server along with an iTunes server, but not a lot else. The Drag and Sort feature is handy – deposit multiple files onto a shortcut icon on your Windows desktop and the Shared Storage II will separate them into music, photo and document folders.

However, there’s no support for FTP transfers, no web hosting and, while user accounts are supported, there’s no facility for enforcing user quotas. At this price, we’d expect more. For very close to the price of the Maxtor, you could purchase the more capable Netgear and two 1TB drives to go with it.