Digital Trends

Iogear's latest network gadget allows any USB device to be tapped by users on a network as if it were directly connected.

You probably don’t need two printers, two scanners, and two external hard drives in your home office. But chances are, if you’ve tried owning just one and lugging it around whenever it was needed on another computer, you own two anyway. Iogear hopes to resolve this problem with its new USB Net ShareStation, released Monday, which allows any USB device to be accessed from all the computers on a network.

The ShareStation is simply a brick with a USB port on one side and an Ethernet jack on the other. By plugging in a USB device (or up to four with a powered USB 2.0 hub), the ShareStation will make it available through an ordinary network using a simple Windows interface. Network users with Iogear’s software installed are able to view a list of available USB devices, click “connect,” and have them available on their PCs exactly as if they were directly connected.

Besides the simple ability to share devices that don’t need to be duplicated, the ShareStation has a number of other novel uses. It could, for instance connect to a webcam to serve as a form of inexpensive surveillance equipment, or to a pair of USB speakers to play music on one room from another room without running speaker cables.