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Yogesh Kamat
Don't be surprised if you soon outgrow your PC's storage capacity. Even if you bought your computer as recently as early 2005, odds are good that you only have 80GB or less of internal hard drive storage. If all you do is type Word documents and send email, then 80GB should last darn near forever.
But let's face facts. Most people enjoy a much more diverse, data-intensive computing experience. According to research, the end of 2004 saw 62 percent of the world's Internet users on broadband. With broadband comes a blizzard of downloadable data--everything from informative background documents (like this one) to music and movie subscription content.
Of course, we love to share data with those closest to us. When your friend emails you a video clip of her kid's first steps, you want everyone in the house to be able to see it without monopolizing your PC time. Home networks make this sharing virtually effortless. Harris Interactive, based on a recent survey, estimates that 24 percent of U.S. houses will have a home network by the end of 2005. Others forecast a near tripling of home network users worldwide between 2004 and 2008.
Incoming data aside, home users generate plenty of data on their own. Look at the convenience of “ripping” one's CD collection so that it can all be organized and played back from any PC on the home network. The Photo Marketing Association International forecasts dramatic rises in digital camera adoption worldwide. For example, according to the Association, over half of all U.S. households will have at least one digital camera by the end of 2005, Germany will be at 50 percent, the U.K. at 42 percent, and Japan will see New Year's 2006 with 64 percent household penetration. Given that 55 percent of the digital cameras sold in 2004 featured at least 4-megapixel resolution, the average size of an ordinary captured image is nearing 3MB.
Just 30 CDs ripped into MP3 format, 30 minutes of home video from a digital camcorder, and 200 photos could devour approximately 5GB of that 80GB drive. We love multimedia and we love to share it, but that huge tide of megabytes can bring your PC's hard drive to its knees in no time. This is why it's so important to move all of that data to a shared drive and make it easily accessible to everyone on the home network.
Enter network-attached storage (NAS) or shared storage. A NAS device is one or more hard drives in an enclosure that connects directly to a network, as in straight into the home or small business router. Like a computer, a NAS box can be accessible to some users but not others, depending on the privacy levels set by the user. For home networks, an affordable NAS device is the ideal way to share content across the network, maintain a second copy of your data, and solve the digital media overload dilemma. Plus you can connect and share a printer to it and print from any PC on the network.
You can even share this drive with other network users. But consider these key points:
- When you set up a consumer-class NAS box, the device automatically shares its data with all users on the network. Just plug it in and go. In contrast, most consumers do not know how to share an external hard drive across a network.
- In order for an external drive to be accessible to the network, the host PC needs to remain on and active 24 hours a day. Rather than remembering to leave your PC on, you can just leave the NAS device on, without risking access to the PC and at a fraction of the power requirements.
- External hard drives show up in Windows with drive letters; NAS boxes show up as network devices (or shares). External hard drives can change drive letters for several reasons, such as when you move them from one PC to another. The external drive might be E: on one system and L: on another. This can breed confusion with users while a NAS box always looks the same from any system on the network.
- If a hacker gains control of your PC, he can likely access all of its directly connected drives. However, since a NAS device is independent of the PC and in fact runs its own self-contained, non-Windows operating system, hacking a NAS device is immensely more difficult.
- Configuring different usage rights for different users is much easier on a NAS device than for a standard external hard drive. After all, you may not want the kids having complete access to your digital media collection.
Network-attached storage has been a rising trend in the corporate world for years. Now, home and small (or “micro”) business network users are starting to realize that they can benefit from NAS devices, as well. Several vendors have consumer NAS products that offer immediate add-on storage across a network and Web browser-based configuration, but each offers varying degrees of value for home users.
To conclude, exceptional ease of use combined with budget-conscious scalability for future storage growth, added to this security, reliability, convenience, and flexibility--and you've got all the makings of a must-have storage and backup solution for any home network.
The author is Country Manager, Indian subcontinent, Maxtor.
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