NAS � the Network Storage Solution

Today, everybody and their grandmother are using computers to store all kinds of information, be it your list of favourite recipes, pictures of the grandkids, that movie you’d been eager to watch or all of the books by your favourite author. Suddenly, the most critical factor has become the amount of hard disk space you have available to store all this information on. The early hard drives from about 20 years or so ago, had about 5MB of storage. But today, the entry level hard drives are at least 40GB – an 8,000 fold increase! It’s only logical that required disk capacity continues to increase in leaps and bounds. Of course, there has to be a way to keep up with this growing demand. Sure, you could try to cope by upgrading your computer regularly, but that’s neither cost effective nor practical � especially if you are considering a small office or a home with more than one computer. This is where a NAS comes in.

A NAS, or a Network Attached Storage device, is basically a shared hard drive. There are many NAS implementations around but the one I have personal experience with is the Synology DS-101. It certainly has many selling points such as its sheer versatility, tiny form factor, future expandability and low-cost. The DS-101 is a little rectangular box which is about 9 inches on each side and is less than 6 inches thick. The heart of the system is a minimal Linux operating system and a hard disk. Since the hard disk can be plugged in fairly easily, you can swap drives fairly quickly. The DS-101 also comes with a network port and three USB ports. The extra USB ports provide the ability to copy data from a variety of devices supporting USB connectivity � like a digital camera or a USB thumb drive. You can also use it as a printer server so that a single USB printer plugged in to the DS-101 can be shared amongst all the people on the network. It’s true that you could do all of this with a desktop computer as well. But the snag is that t would cost a bit more and it would not be as easy for other people to use since you might accidentally switch the computer off. Or, it might crash while somebody else is trying to print a large document or restore an urgent backup.

The DS-101 can also act as a backup server. It comes with software that can be installed on your computer so that it can automatically backup any file you specify to the DS-101 making automated backups rather painless. Then there is the fact that it works out-of-the-box with your router, that you can use it as an FTP server and that it supports dual voltages � meaning that you can use it virtually anywhere in the world. (No, I don’t work for them or receive a commission for this article :p)

Basically, the DS-101 is a low-cost solution for backups, file-sharing or printer sharing. In fact, the DS-101 can be used as an alternate server for most work environments so that you free up the actual servers for mission-critical applications. Instead of clogging up your server with a large print job, you can let the DS-101 handle that while your server hums merrily along doing the stuff that�s really important. And since the DS-101 has the ability to upgrade it�s firmware so that it can support bigger hard drives and offer more features, there’s always the possibility that there will be more functionality tagged on as time passes. When I first bought it about a year ago, they were touting it as a 4-in-1 solution (file server, backup server, printer server and FTP server) but today they call it a 6-in-1 solution after having added what they call photo station and web station capabilities. Don’t ask me what those mean � I don’t use them … I simply dump all my downloads on the thing and that’s about all I use it for :p

Be it the DS-101 or a different solution, a NAS certainly can be an easy way to store a lot of files which are shared between several different computers and it certainly frees up your own hard disk space for more important stuff � like games :)

Related posts:

1. 1.5TB and 2TB duo drive! Solution to all multimedia data storage problems
2. Mapping Network Drives in Windows XP
3. Configure Your Computer to Backup to Windows Home Server
4. Step-by-Step Guide to Network XP to Vista Printer
5. PROMISE Announces Software ROMB Solution for AMD SP5100 Chipset

Filed Under: Computer Hardware