Maxtor Fusion 500GB Home Media Hub

Maxtor 500 GB Fusion media hub combines elements of network-attached storage and personal media servers to act as a vault for your photos, video, and music.

Although its consumption by drive-maker Seagate has just been completed, Maxtor is quietly rolling out its Maxtor Fusion personal media hub, which combines the concepts of network-attached storage (NAS) with personal media servers to act as a central media repository on your home network for your photos, music, and videos.

Based in part on technology developed by Fabrik (co-founded by former Maxtor honcho Mike Cordano), the Maxtor Fusion doesn't look a whoel lot different from the company's OneTouch backup drives—except, under the hood, its packing a few surprises, including a 500 GB 7200RPM hard drive. But the Fusion also sports built-in gigabit Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports (which can be used to connect additional hard drive storage), and Fabrik's web-based media interface which acts as a mini-server, taking advantage of AJAX to enable drag-and-drop functionality and other interface pleasantries not normally seen in Web applications. Users can store their household's photos, music, video on the Fusion and organize it using a Web browser, adding buttons, tags, descriptors, and folders.

The Fusion also enables users to share their content: users just indicate they'd like to make content available, enter appropriate email address(es), and the Fusion will send email invitations to your guests (assuming, naturally, you've got a broadband Internet connection). Fusion owners can also create user accounts on the device with their own logins and passwords. Bloggers will be pleased to note content on the Fusion can be "micro-linked" to blogs and Web pages, and will match tags up with those already on your blog. And the Fusion does its best to protect your content from the big bad Internet, offering passwords protection and other security features.

The Fusion is usable from current Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems (Firefox is your best bet for a browser), and should be available by August 2006 in wide distribution for about $800.Source