Reg Kit Watch Asus is promising to "change your perception on data storage" when it releases what may be the world's first Wi-Fi enabled network-attached hard drive storage system.

The WL-HDD is a hard drive enclosure capable of taking any 2.5in ATA-100 hard disk. The enclosure also contains an 802.11g adaptor and antenna, plus a pair of wired 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports.

The unit is managed through an HTML interface, which allows you to determine which clients have access to the hard drive, whether to simply read files, write them or block access altogether.

The HL-WDD is expected to ship in May for $150 - minus the hard drive, of course.

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Next quarter is also expected to see the arrival of USB 2.0-based Wi-Fi adaptors. Looking rather like USB Flash drives, the devices offer an easier way to add wireless networking to a machine, desktops in particular, and to provide an ad hoc WLAN capacity.

Some adaptors may indeed incorporate solid state storage, like the variety of devices that have come to market over the last three or four months.

The second generation of drives will support the faster USB 2.0 specification and add 802.11g networking, according to Taiwanese WLAN chip makers who are ramping up volumes of the silicon that will make the new products possible. ®

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