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Storage Hotspot #2: The Living Room Box
There are four multimedia devices likely to go in the living room or home theater area of a digital home: a home theater PC (HTPC), set-top box (STB or DVR/PVR), centralized storage/media server, or a digital media adapter (DMA). Which makes the most sense for you will depend on your multimedia preferences and habits.
An HTPC is a full-blown PC optimized for home theater applications, generally meaning TV tuning, video storage, photo slideshows, and often gaming. Top performance is achieved when content is stored locally within the HTPC, although pulling data across a high-speed network from a primary PC located elsewhere in the house can serve well enough in some cases. (In such instances, wired is better than wireless.) Many HTPCs cannot accommodate more than one or two hard drives, making backup and/or secondary storage across the network a priority for those who amass a lot of content. Additionally, HTPCs generally get left on 24 hours a day so that they can be accessed by anyone in the home at any time and can record shows late into the night. The downside of this is increased power consumption as well as higher security risk since HTPCs tend to be protected less than primary PCs and are hackable for more hours of the day.
A digital home set-top box is something like a TiVo PVR or a cable/satellite decoder box with built-in recording capabilities. Most industry analysts feel that the majority of digital video recording is and will be done with DVR set-tops as it is the simplest and most affordable way to digitally record television and currently the only way to record digital HDTV broadcasts. The majority of set-tops come with about 120 hours of storage (standard definition recording), courtesy of a 120GB hard drive, and is marketed as having its capacity permanently fixed. However, many set-tops can have their hard drives upgraded. weaKnees.com in particular has made an entire business out of upgrading set-tops, enabling them to record up to 900 hours, although doing so may change the warranty on the device.
Moving to digital media adapters, they are disk-less bridges that pull all of their data from the network. DMAs are a great idea if they connect back to a beefy primary media PC (why bother connecting to a slow system with 80GB of storage, after all?) since they tend to be as user-friendly as a set-top, have far greater functionality, and carry no inherent subscription fees. On the other hand, the main advantage of an HTPC over set-tops or DMAs is that only an HTPC can (so far) provide for applications such as gaming and Web surfing.
No matter how you tackle the living room, though, the key is to identify what content you want displayed there and install plenty of storage capacity for present and future needs at whatever point that content will be saved.
Storage Hotspot #3: The Network Media Server
In the consumer world, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, also called network shared storage, have become increasingly popular as a safe, easy, dependable way to quickly add storage to an office so that anyone (with permission) on the LAN can access. The advantage of a shared storage solution is that it simply plugs into the network, and there is no host PC to depend upon. Thus data on a shared storage box is immune to malware and most system failures that plague many computers. No matter how many systems on the LAN go down, the shared storage solution keeps dishing up data to whoever wants it.
The reasons IT managers love NAS still apply in the digital home. It pays to have a small, quiet, power-efficient storage server for multimedia content that can stream to any PC on the LAN. Particularly in areas where electricity costs are skyrocketing, being able to turn off a kilowatt-guzzling primary PC and still have all of your photos, videos, and other files available throughout the home can be a serious plus.
A consumer shared storage device shouldn't be underestimated as a backup device, either. In the event of natural disaster or such, the drive can be unplugged and whisked to safety. As those who have suffered fire or flood will often testify, the most painful losses are often the digital memories and memorabilia of a family's history, not everyday objects that can be replaced.
Play On
Twenty years ago, PCs were perceived as being horribly complex, cost-prohibitive devices unsuited to the average consumer's home. Today, the equipment behind crafting a digital home has something of the same stigma. You don't need to build an end-to-end digital home all at once. The trick is know what pieces you want, then add them as need and budget allow with an eye always on high-speed network performance and plenty of easily accessible storage. With time and slow investment, the many life-changing benefits of living in a digital home will naturally follow.
Yogesh Kamat is the country manager, Indian Subcontinent, Maxtor
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