For IT, the key to the Mine's usefulness is the built-in Ethernet port for LAN connectivity. Unfortunately, this feature turned into a modest disappointment. The built-in NIC is strictly a 10Mbit interface. Understandably, material cost is of prime concern for any consumer electronics appliance. The magic number for consumer devices is $500 and, at $599, the Mine's price tag is not far off. For just this reason, most laptop computers, destined for home or SOHO use, still do not feature an embedded NIC.

Laptops that target corporate power users, however, consistently sport embedded 10/100 NICs. For fast local transfers of data—updating the pages of web site—a 100Mbit LAN connection is mandatory. This is especially true if you plan to use the Mine as a local data collection device. The emphasis here is strictly on local LAN connections. Even for sites with T1 connections to the Internet, a 10Mbits-per-second connection to a gateway server will not come close to exhausting that connection's bandwidth.

The Mine easily handles the task of collecting small data files on the order of tens of megabytes. That standard 10GB hard drive that comes with the Mine, however, calls out for far more serious use. Whether collecting data for manufacturing process flows or deep-space exploration, real-time data acquisition often calls for files that are hundreds of megabytes, if not gigabytes, in size. Storing files of this order of magnitude in size at a sludge-like speed of 10Mbits per second can be aggravating.

The potential of the serious side of Terapin's PDS can be seen in its networking capabilities. In addition to sharing its files over a LAN, the Mine can be configured to exchange files bi-directionally over the Internet using FTP. It can attach to an FTP server on the net either via a gateway server on the LAN or by using a PCMCIA modem card and dialing up an ISP.  Using the 16-character x 4-line screen to navigate and download files from a populous directory tree can be a bit daunting, but it does work nicely.

Setting up all of the Mine's technical pyrotechnics is done on a Windows PC by running the MineControlPanel application, which is found in Mine's root directory. This must be accessed initially by connecting the Mine to the Windows-based client via a USB port. Once this is done—drivers may need to be loaded on earlier versions of Windows 9x or NT—the Mine immediately appears as a shared disk volume.

The MineContolPanel can be used to create any number of configuration profiles. Eleven configuration tabs are used to define everything from which FTP servers the Mine will access on the Net to what MP3 files will make up an audio playback list. This somewhat confusing array of tabs accurately portrays the somewhat conflicting dual personalities of the Mine: corporate IT tool and personal entertainment station.

For IT, the two tabs of immediate concern are the "LAN Info" and the "Data Exchange" configurations. The former is rather straight forward affair. It is worth noting, however, that the built-in NIC and PCMCIA-based wireless LAN options are mutually exclusive. If the wireless LAN option is checked, the NIC will not function even in the absence of a wireless LAN card.

The Data Exchange tab is used to define FTP servers and user IDs to logon to these servers. Server names entered here are automatically placed in the Mine's Data Sharing menu. Once an FTP server is chosen from the main menu and the Mine is instructed to either get files from the server or put files on the server, the front panel navigation buttons are then employed to traverse the server's directory tree.

The Mine's alternate personality is that of a personal entertainment station. Much like the new hard-disk based video appliances, the 10GB hard drive in the Mine is used to store libraries of CDs and videos. If you plan on playing back the audio tracks directly through the Mine—the Mine does support a headphone/microphone jack—then the file format must be .mp3 or .wav.

We used the Mine in conjunction with our Omnibook laptop and Windows Media Player, which prefers to save files as .wma. In this case the audio is streamed back at 192Kbits per second, which is well within the capability of the Mine's NIC.

More taxing on the Mine, we stored several films from http://www.bmwfilms.com/. These we played back through the Apple QuickTime player. Once again the Mine had no trouble streaming the data and keeping the image free from any flickering.

To complement all of this audio/video razzmatazz, the Mine has the extraordinary capability of directly sending email to an SMTP server and receiving email from a POP3 account. After all, this is a Linux server. Nonetheless, scrolling through a day's worth of email on the Mine's petite screen would tax the patience of the most stolid stoic.

We benchmarked I/O throughput from the Mine  using our OBLfileload benchmark running on an HP Omnibook 6000. We expected to find throughput bottlenecked at the speed of the NIC. What we found was that Mine streamed data at a rate distinctly under 10Mbits per second.

 We chose to run our tests first with 1 client and then incrementally increasing the number of clients until we reach a maximum of 5 clients. Each client read data sequentially in 8KB blocks from a 200MB file.

With a single client, thoughput hovered about 580KB per second. With multiple clients, throughput peaked at about 800KB per second.  The maximum variation in throughput per process was on the order of 4%.