Living With Nas

A network-attached storage (Nas) drive is more than just a hard disk. The fact that the drive is connected to your entire network – rather than being directly connected to a PC – adds another level of complexity to the situation.

To use the drive, each computer on the network will need to know the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the Nas drive so it can connect and send data back and forth between the computer and the drive.

Most of the products in this group test include some sort of configuration software that will determine the drive’s IP address. You can then enter that address into a web browser and configure the drive through a series of web pages stored on the drive itself and accessed through an ordinary browser.

This process can be confusing for people with less experience of networking, so it’s hats off to Iomega for automating the process with the Discovery Tool software that it includes with its Storcenter drive. This program does all the work for you, so that installing the Storcenter is no more complicated than connecting an ordinary USB drive to your PC.

Share and share alike
You may be happy to share the Nas drive with everyone else on your network, but a good Nas drive will also allow you to create ‘shares’. These are individual user accounts – similar to the user accounts you can create for Windows itself, except that each account has its own set of folders on the shared Nas drive.

Each user should be able to create ‘shared’ or ‘public’ folders that are open to other users, as well as ‘private’ folders that can be protected by a password. This ensures that you’ve got a degree of privacy for your important files, even though the drive itself is physically being shared by several people.

Technically speaking, any computer that can be connected to the internet can be connected to a Nas drive. You just need to know the drive’s IP address so t hat you can tell the computer to connect to it. In practice, though, you’ll need to know a fair bit about your computer’s networking features to do this.

Many home users won’t have that degree of knowledge, so it’s really up to the manufacturer of the Nas drive to provide support for different operating systems, such as Windows, the Mac OS and Linux. Some of the products in this group test don’t bother to do that, which means they can only be used on ‘homogeneous’ networks that consist purely of Windows PCs.

So if you’re a Linux fan, or one of your kids has a Mac, you need to ensure that any Nas drive you buy can support those operating systems.

It’s a Raid
Another important feature for more knowledgeable users is Raid – redundant array of independent (or inexpensive) disks Many Nas drives consist of two or more drives linked together (the 500GB Storcenter includes two separate drives of 250GB each).

Using Raid can increase the performance and reliability of your Nas drive. You can find more information on the topic.

Other features to look out for include built-in USB ports. Some drives, such as the La Cie Ethernet Disk Mini, have a single USB port that merely allows you to connect the drive to a USB port on your PC (effectively treating it like an ordinary external USB drive).

However, other drives have multiple USB ports that allow you to connect additional devices to the drive itself. If you connect a USB printer to your Nas drive you will be able to treat it as a ‘network printer’ that can be used by everyone on the network.

You can even add more storage to your network by buying an ordinary USB hard disk and connecting it to the Nas drive. The storage capacity of the USB drive will be added to that of the Nas drive, and can be shared by everyone on the network.

One other interesting feature that is increasingly being added to Nas drives is support for universal plug and play (UPnP). This is a standard that allows many types of device to communicate with each other, without requiring a PC to act as an intermediary.

Many media players, such as Pinnacle’s Soundbridge wireless music player, support UPnP. So if your Nas drive supports UPnP you can store music on the Nas drive and then stream the music directly to the Soundbridge over the network without having to turn on your PC.

This article is part of a group test of network-attached devices.
See also
Adaptec Snap Server 110
Buffalo Linkstation Multimedia Home Server
Buffalo Terastation Home Server
Freecom Storage Gateway WLAN
Iomega Storcenter Network Hard Drive
La Cie Ethernet Disk Mini
Linksys EFG120
Maxtor Shared Storage II
Plextor PX-EH25L
Western Digital Netcenter 500
DIY NAS

The table of features can be read via our pdf download.