NAS devices offer big storage on small networks

We are collecting and keeping more information today than ever before. Whether it's video, pictures, music, or just plain old gobs of e-mail and text messages, all that information has to be stored and backed up.

Even in a down economy, the obvious temptation is to rush out, grab a handful of hard drives (no matter what the sizes) and hook one up to each of your computers -- especially since storage is now really cheap. If you look around for a deal on a hard disk you can sometimes find an external 1TB unit for only a little over US$100. But while that may sound like a plan, if you take that approach you're effectively fragmenting your life. (As the owner of 11 computers, I can pretty much vouch for that being the case.)

The better idea, assuming you are networked, is to take a tip from enterprise-level IT and latch on to some network-attached storage (NAS). In fact, a number of NAS units suitable for households and small businesses have recently hit the market. These devices don't have the capabilities or the features of the enterprise-level NAS units, but they offer higher performance and a lot more storage than your typical external USB backup drive at reasonable prices.

A NAS storage device typically holds more than one drive; some come already equipped with hard drives, while others are simply empty boxes waiting for you to choose the drives that go inside. The number of drives can vary -- some units max out at two drives while some stretch to five.

RAIDing your drives
These multiple-drive devices store your data in different ways, depending on the RAID technology schemes they use.

The two-drive units typically support only RAID 0 , which "stripes" the data across both drives and utilizes about 93% of the space available, and RAID 1 , which mirrors the contents of one drive onto the other so you can quickly recover from a crash and thus uses about 47% of the drives' capacity.

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