The timid NAS

The Network Attached Storage has always been, in my opinion, one of the most useful pieces of hardware that one could find in a household of 3 or more computers. The reason I believe this to be the case is the pure practicality of having such a device. Let me explain.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, the majority of end-users still seem to be unaware of the importance of backing up files. There are over a thousand different ways that you PC could lose all its data immediately making it very difficult to recover anything. Investing in a device such as an external hard disk is very important and becoming more and more popular. But a NAS is one step ahead. So what is this NAS thing I keep referring to?

A Network Attached Storage device is something which is attached to a computer network and made accessible to all the users on that network. It houses one or more hard disks which can be used for multiple purposes; the first and foremost being a central backup location. If you have many computers in your house and want to back them all up regularly, you can simply set all the computers to back up on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. This means you no longer have to worry about backing up your computer. Just leave it on before you sleep and it’ll back up and turn off by itself. Beautiful. You can also use the NAS as a print server. The majority of printers on the market today are USB 2.0 and do not usually allow for network expansion which therefore means only you can print from it. Yes, you can always connect your printer to a PC and share it, but that means the PC connected to the printer has to be on all the time. Nicht Gut. Most NAS devices come with one or two USB ports so this solves your problem. You can plug your printer into your NAS! You can also use the device as a central storage location for you household. You can put all your music files on there and set up your music library to simply link to your library instead of duplicating a library 12 times. All your family photos and valuable info can go on there for safe storage, and best of all, you can set it up as an FTP server. This means that if you’re on holiday in Taiwan and really want to listen to access your files, it’s only a step away. Type in the IP of your NAS in a browser (or a domain name if you’ve set one up for the NAS) and type in your username and password. The Network Attached Storage device is a necessity for “wired” households and, although it’s been around for years, it hasn’t been exploited to its pull potential.

Microsoft has obviously seen the need for such a device and made a new operating system called Windows Home Server. This software is seen by Microsoft as “better than NAS devices”. I don’t think this is entirely true. Windows Home Server is just extremely easy to use whereas NAS requires a bit more networking knowledge to set up and maintain. It’s up to you to make the choice. The home server option however, is going to be a lot more expensive. The Microsoft OS costs a dollar under $600 for the 500MB version and increases for the terabyte version. Then you have to take the price of the hardware into consideration. NAS suddenly becomes considerably cheap when you can get it for about $400 for a 1-terabyte device.

I hope you see now why the NAS is such a useful device. My personal favourite is the Maxtor Shared Storage II. Check it out.