Anyone here with experience of this particular bit of kit?
I do some work for a small office with 4 PCs and two networked printers, using peer-to-peer networking, they used this particular Maxtor device for a centralised share system before upgrading their network - now it's a backup device, and a Freecom NAS drive is the main device for all files. They had a problem with the network recently, suddenly no internet connectivity though they could still share files between computers and the NAS - this with two brand new computers from PC World (and installed by one of their tech bods) and a new router. I ascertained that none of the machines were getting IP addresses from the router (Linksys/Cisco WAG160) but I couldn't work out what was causing the problem. I set all the devices to fixed IP addresses, which solved the internet connection problem, but having taken the Maxtor away (time issues) to configure it for static IP, I find it still allocates itself an IP address automatically even when specifically configured not to - I allocated 192.168.1.130 when connected to a laptop with a crossover cable, but when I attached it to a Speedtouch router it allocated itself an IP address of 192.168.1.250 - not a problem, on the same subnet I originally chose and the correct subnet for that router, but still - it's not the fixed address I actually chose. I'll take the device back this week to add it back to the network, which has been working perfectly since I reconfigured it and took the Maxtor away - but I'm thinking that it might be the cause of the networking problem, given that it seems to select an IP address regardless of how it's configured. Any thoughts?

I've no experience of NAS drives but, if its IP addressing has become "confused", is there a Reset button with which you can set it back to factory default settings?

The IP address of 192.168.1.250 strikes me as being too "obvious" considering that it could have obtained any address in the Subnet from the Router's DHCP server; is this perhaps the device's default IP address? If you've allocated fixed IP addresses to all of the other devices in the network (computers, other NAS drive and "network" printers), you could disable the Router's DHCP server so that the Maxtor couldn't get its IP address by DHCP.

I've had more time to experiment with this - I'm holding off using the reset unless there's something I'm totally unable to fix.

You could well be right about the default address - connecting up with the laptop and crossover cable again, the address was back to 192.168.1.130. I've disabled DHCP on the router at the office and all is well so far with their other equipment, when I re-attach the NAS sometime this week I'll check which address it's using just for sake of documenting everything correctly.