Access your data at home and on the road

Consumer appetite for storage is insatiable. And in the days of high-def video and other, as yet undreamed digital content, it doesn't look like it will be satiated any time soon.

Multiple computers connecting to a central home network is an excellent way to share Internet access among PCs. The traditional home network offers limited file sharing across the network too. For example, in Windows, the central home PC can share its "My Pictures" (or other) folder on the network so that anyone with connection privileges can access the folder across the network. It's far from a perfect solution though. The PC with the shared folder or folders must always be on (and not hibernating) or the shared folder disappears from the network. There's also a limit to how much users can realistically offer up to be used as network storage and some security issues are introduced when offering up portions of your computer on the network.

Enter NAS or network attached storage. NAS is an ideal solution for shared storage across a home network. NAS solutions generally offer up to 1TB and beyond of shared storage, perfect for sharing and streaming the family's digital content whether a shared music or video collection, family pictures or home movies. NAS drives are also ideal when used as a central back-up facility for computers on the network; many offer simple back-up utilities and in some cases, one-touch backup.

Since your NAS drive runs independently from the computers that access it, any new PCs that enter the home can access the shared storage and any important data held there. For Mac and PC users, it's usually a simple process. For Linux users, there's some terminal bashing to be done.

Network vs. physical drives

Network drives are useful for sharing files large or small across the network. However, as they are a network resource, some applications may not be able to use them directly. For example, if your entire music collection is housed on a network drive, you may not be able to access the music directory directly as you would with a physical drive. That is to say, your audio player of choice may not be able to add songs from the network drive to your playlist. Ditto your video player or favourite photo organization software.

Many NAS drives will auto configure computers using a setup disc to map the network share as a physical drive. If not though, mapping a shared drive to act as a physical one in your PC is easy under Windows or Mac and do-able under Linux though a little more involved. See sidebar "Mapping a networked share."

Networked vs. Direct

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the average consumer looking to expand their storage possibilities without cracking open their PC case will opt for direct storage as opposed to networked storage. Whether this is because direct is easier to set up (though in fairness, networked is very simple too) or because of the price point difference is not clear. Plugging in a USB or FireWire cable seems a lot less intimidating than an Ethernet cable.

Terabyte drives (~1,000GB) are the latest answer to our rapidly expanding personal storage needs.

Just so I can make it in the annals of history, people that really should know better than to make predictions about how much is enough when it comes to computing power or storage, "I can't see anyone ever needing more than a terabyte of storage."
In truth, we'll figure out a way to fill 1TB without too much difficulty and we'll start wistfully waiting for petabyte drives (1,000TB or 1,000,000GB) to come along.

Next: LaCie Ethernet Disk mini Home Edition

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