The NetDisk 351UNE that IOCell Networks announced Wednesday is an external hard drive enclosure that can house a SATA hard drive of any capacity. Apart from the USB 2.0 and eSATA connections, what makes the NetDisk 351UNE different from all other enclosures is that it also has a Gigabit Ethernet port.
This means that apart from hooking up to a computer as a direct-attached-storage device, the NetDisk 315UNE can also be connected to a router, just like a NAS server. However, unlike an NAS server that can work by itself to access the NetDisk over a network, you will need to install its NDAS software on one of the networked computers. The computer then becomes the host let lets others computers access the data stored on the device.
So, basically, this is a network-direct-attached-storage device which, like all external hard drives, depends upon a computer to work.
Source – Cnet
