But the Maxtor Fusion may have other problems gaining acceptance. At about $700, it is nearly twice the price of other 500-gigabyte hard drives. Current Analysis, a San Diego market research firm, said consumers would pay only a $100 premium for this type of software and service.

The other problem comes after the box is taken home. The first part of setting up the storage device is a joy. Plug in the cables and turn it on. Run the software on the enclosed disc and within five minutes you can move data, photos, videos and music to the storage and to every device on your network. The second part, enabling the device to provide access to data from outside your home network is  well, let Maxtor’s user guide describe it: “This portion of the setup may prove challenging to complete.” Owners are faced with bewildering instructions about configuring the system to reroute dynamic D.N.S. addresses.

Image Credit... Illustration by Dave Ember

If you know what that means, then you won’t have a problem. For everyone else, be prepared to call Maxtor’s technical support to get it running. Better setup software could solve this problem.

(If you insist on knowing, computers seeking access to the home storage device from outside the home network have to know the address of the device. But because most Internet service providers do not assign a static address, an additional service has to be used to locate and route requests to whatever address your service provider has assigned to it.)

That said, the Fusion does what it promises. It is easy to store data and to designate what the public can see.

Mr. Baker predicts that the device will take some time to catch on. “It’s a next-year product,” he said. But David Tang, vice president for marketing at Fabrik, says it will appeal to the type of people using MySpace and to other creative types who want to share their content by streaming music or video to friends.