In the age of plentiful downloads and broadband connections, it’s easy to fill up your computer’s hard disk with music files, digital photographs and even full-length Hollywood blockbuster movies. That creates a few problems.

Most of us solve this problem by buying one of the many affordable USB hard disks that are now available. That’s fine if you just own one computer, but more and more homes now have two or three computers used by different members of the family.

If you’ve got a network set up at home, then a much better solution is to use something called network-attached storage (Nas).

Drive time
A Nas drive is just like any other type of hard disk, but instead of a USB port it has a network interface built into it. This allows you to connect it to a network router just as you would connect any ordinary PC. Once the Nas drive is connected to the network it can then be used by any PC on the network. The advantage of Nas compared with USB disks is that a Nas drive does not require a PC to be on in order for other PCs on the network to access it.

Large corporations have been using Nas drives for years so that employees can share files and make backup copies of their important data. But now that home networks and broadband internet connections are becoming increasingly common, Nas drives start to make sense for home users too.

There are quite a few Nas drives available, offering a wide range of different features and prices, but there are a few basics to think about before buying one for your home network.

The first feature is, of course, the size of the disk. A Nas drive is going to be shared by several people, so it needs to provide enough storage for everyone’s music collections, digital photos, video clips and other personal files. Most Nas drives start at about £150-£200 for a 250GB model. Prices increase to £250-£350 for a 500GB drive, while a full terabyte (1,000GB) will cost £500 or more.

Box and shares
But, as the saying goes, size isn’t everything. One thing we discovered while testing a number of these Nas drives is that some of them can be quite complicated to set up. Buffalo’s Linkstation is attractively priced, providing 300GB of storage for just under £200, but we found that its software and manual were a bit untidy, and might confuse people who don’t know very much about networking.

In contrast, Iomega’s Storcenter is a little more expensive, costing £180 for a slightly smaller 250GB disk, but is much easier to use. The Discovery program provided with the drive automatically searches your network to locate the Storcenter and then displays it as just another device in the ‘My Computer’ window on your Desktop. You can then copy files onto the Storcenter just by dragging them onto the icon with your mouse.

The Iomega software also makes it easy to create individual user accounts – sometimes known as ‘shares’ – to keep your important files safe. Each person who has a computer on the network can have their own user account, and each user account has its own ‘home’ folder on the Nas drive.

Inside the home folder you can create additional folders, which can be either public or private. The public folders can be used by anyone on the network – making it easy to share files with other people – while the private folders can be password-protected to keep important files safe from prying eyes.