Strato HiDrive review

Strato's HiDrive is an online storage service that offers 500GB of capacity for storing and sharing files, available for just a £9 payment for the first six months, thereafter rising to a monthly subscription fee of £19.

HiDrive, which was made officially available in early December 2010, is aimed at professional users. For this reason, Strato supports encrypted communications and also provides an automatic backup of each customer account, allowing users to retrieve deleted files.

Although aimed at professionals, the service is pretty straightforward to use for anyone who has had even the most basic experience of Windows networks, and can be configured so that the HiDrive appears as just another logical drive connected to a user's computer. The service is thus well suited for sharing files between the members of a workgroup, or making such files securely available for access outside an organisation's firewall.

HiDrive could also be used as an off-site repository for backups, as Strato itself backs up each customer account within its European datacentres, providing an extra layer of protection against losing vital data.

We tested HiDrive using our office computer running Windows XP, and were surprised to find that we could connect up to it as if it were a shared folder on the local area network (LAN), using Microsoft's server message block (SMB) protocol.

However, this is not recommended, for several reasons. SMB is not secure, and so should not be operated over the open internet; and the protocol is also " chatty", which is not a great problem on a LAN, but the longer time taken for command and response exchanges between a PC and a remote server could severely affect performance.

Fortunately, HiDrive supports a number of protocols, including WebDAV, FTP, SFTP, and rsync, which also means that other platforms such as Macs, Linux PCs and even mobile devices can access a HiDrive account.

We found it just as easy to set up our HiDrive account using WebDAV over HTTPS, which under Windows will even remember your login credentials so you do not have to key them in every time you need to access the HiDrive.

In this configuration, we were able to write files direct from Microsoft Word to the HiDrive, for example, as well as copy and move files around just like you can between a PC and a fileserver.

To get started with HiDrive, customers first log in to a web-based console that manages their account settings.

From here, you can add users, if you are sharing the 500GB HiDrive among several users, for example. Each user gets their own private folder, plus a shared public folder to exchange files.