Arkview Network Device USB 2.0 Share Hub

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  Hazmat said,

  Review by Hazmat
  Rating:
  Just got the Arkview USB server share device for the primary function of sharing a printer on my home network. The good news is that setup could not have been easier and it works like a champ for printer sharing (and this evenis an old parallel port job that I use with a parallel to USB cable). So far so good. Also tried to share a couple of USB flash drives…works like a champ again. The only problem I have is it apparently is not compatible with my Memorex DVD drive. It finds it and connects fine but when you try to view it on any PC it simply shows one file, which it thinks is some kind of Audio cd analog file and no matter what CD or DVD you put in it simply shows that same one file. So a mixed bag. Otherwise if you stick to the drives on the compatibility list I am sure you will be fine. Good solid product, easy setup and easy connection software. That’s about all.

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  C. Kranz said,

  Review by C. Kranz
  Rating:
  I bought this item because I figured it would be less expensive to purchase this device than it would be to buy a wireless printer. I also figured I would then be able to set up access to my external hard drive wirelessly.

  I have set up my printer to be able to print wirelessly from both a Mac and PC. (The Mac was a little bit harder but I think that may be because of the type of printer I had. Most printers are compatable.

  I haven’t yet set up my external hard drive because you have to buy a separate device to be able to hook up more than one USB connection at a time. You need to buy a USB hub. (Like this Belkin USB 2.0 4-Port Ultra Mini Hub F5U407) They aren’t very expensive but it would have been nice to know it was not included. (Only one USB port is on the back)

  I still think that this item is worth the price. I absolutely love being able to print wirelessly from my laptop and overall it was very easy to set up.

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  M. Harms said,

  Review by M. Harms
  Rating:
  I was hoping to use this device as what one other reviewer called “a poor man’s NAS.” The product works as advertised and I had no problem adding the device to my network or installing the driver CD and utilities that come with the product. Since this product isn’t really an NAS device, it does not come close to doing what I needed it to, which was to add a USB 1gb external drive to my home LAN. The device supports the drive, but when I actually try to use the drive, my laptop crashes.

  Think of this device as a kind of USB extender. It will allow you to use a USB device connected over the LAN as though it were on your PC. But do make sure that your device is listed as compatible before you buy!

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  I. Duenas said,

  Review by I. Duenas
  Rating:
  While the device is very small it’s not really what I thought it would be. It’s supposed to share any USB type device over the network but it only does this if you load the software that comes with it. That software is easy enough to install and use. I wanted to share a new USB printer over the network. Using the software that comes with it made it very easy to install the printer but if you don’t want to use that software then it becomes rather tricky. I was finally able to install a network port on my Windows PC without having to use the software. I was expecting that this device work just like a HP JetDirect card but it doesn’t. It uses LPR and some rather cryptic queue name. And lately the device has not responded while trying to print, I’ve had to go and reset the device and the printer a couple of times and the time it takes to print a job is considerably longer than if I was plugged in directly to the printer, even very simple text only print jobs.

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  B. Tracy said,

  Review by B. Tracy
  Rating:
  I bought this in the hopes that I could plug a USB hard disk into it allowing my wife to access her iTunes music without having to turn another whole computer on to get it.

  So far it works all right, but there are a couple unfortunate things about it:

  1. You have to use their software to manually attach to the drive each time you want to use it. There seems to be no way to automatically attach to the drive at Windows start up, for example.

  2. There doesn’t seem to be a way to reserve a drive letter for the drive when you attach it. It just grabs the next drive letter. This could become a problem down the line if I add something else to the system. If the drive starts showing up as a different letter, I’d end up having to rediscover the entire iTunes library.

  Don’t get me wrong, the drive is network attached and accessible over my wireless network. It’s just not as clean as a true NAS device. That’s why I termed it a “poor man’s NAS”. Luckily, that’s all I really need!

  Update:
  
  This product up and decided to change the drive letter it used when accessing it from our laptop last night. This rendered my wife’s iTunes library useless. After an hour of fiddling I got the library back, but I’m going to take this out of service as a file server and repurpose our old laptop as a file server instead.

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