Many people are realising the benefits of accessing their data over a network.

Storing data on networkable devices gives extra capacity without messing around with disk upgrades.

It offers easy, centralised backup facilities, shared access to data that could support multiple platforms, such as PCs and Macs, and means that even if you buy a new PC or extra systems, your data is ready to be accessed from them.

The market for network attached-storage (Nas) devices has exploded over the past year.

At its simplest, a Nas is a box containing one or more hard disks, which connects to your network and presents the storage as a sharable volume. More sophisticated models support Raid, P2P or torrent downloads, or act as iTunes servers.

A Nas is normally sold either with hard disks already fitted, or as a basic unit ready to be fitted with your disks, but you can also build your own.

Nas processor and memory requirements are very modest. You could build one with an old PC, equipping it with a big hard disk and a Gigabit Ethernet card for better network performance if desired.

There are several Nas software packages. Freenas is a popular, especially as there’s no charge, but at the time of writing it was still in beta and you may not want to trust your data to something that isn’t 100 per cent complete; see www.freenas.org.

One of the best options is Naslite 2 from Server Elements. This is available as a downloadable CD image from www.serverelements.com for about £18. If you have existing hardware, you could build a very affordable Nas, that could potentially outperform a commercial model. Here’s how.

Naslite 2 is available in two main versions, both with the same functionality once running, but one boots from a CD and the other from a USB device, such as a flash memory key. If your motherboard supports bootable USB drives, the latter is preferable because the USB device can store any configuration changes that otherwise require a floppy disk drive on the CD version.

The downloadable ISO images for Naslite 2 are just 5.02MB and 6.63MB for the CD and USB versions respectively, and any CD writing program should be able to burn a disc from them. The compact OS is based on Linux and, once booted, runs in an 8MB Ram disk.

Naslite 2 requires a Pentium or better (500MHz would be fine), at least 64MB of Ram, a PCI network adapter (this could be onboard), a bootable CD (and bootable USB media of at least 16MB for the USB option), and of course a hard disk for the storage. It supports IDE, Sata, SCSI, USB and Firewire interfaces, along with hardware Raid cards or chipsets.

There’s a full list of compatible storage and network controllers at the Server Elements website, but since Naslite 2 is based on the Linux 2.4.x kernel, a wide range of chipsets is supported. Naslite 3 is due for early 2007 and will be based on the 2.6 kernel with support for newer hardware, which should include the Promise Supertrak EX8350 hardware Raid card.