[grogi]

D-Link DNS-323 NAS
"As our personal media libraries continue to grow larger and large each day, serious consideration needs to be given to our storage capabilities. With our PCs filling up with personal photos, movies, music and por... more movies, we all have a considerable amount of time invested in our collections. I personally have taken my CDs and ripped them onto my computer at an acceptable bit rate, allowing me to stream them to my Squeezebox in my living room.

With all this time and effort that I put into my digital media, it's easy to overlook the unstable nature of disk storage. While many disk drives come with impressive warranties, like Seagate's 320 and 750GB drives we have looked at in the past, this only guarantees that the drive will be replaced in the event of a failure. It in no way suggests that the drive will actually survive the warranted time in its entirety. This is in no way an implication that today's hard drives are not reliable.

On the contrary, I feel quite comfortable with the drives I currently use and should something ever happen, there is usually more than enough warning when a drive is close to irreversible failure. Adding to this is the large scale availability of this media thanks to the invasion of broadband into our homes.

To address these storage concerns, there are a few ways to ensure that your data is at least safer than it would be if nothing one done at all. One approach, and this is usually the cheapest, is to purchase a separate hard drive and only store media on it. While this will protect your data should a hard drive fail (assuming it's not the media drive itself) you're still left being only one step away from disaster.

Another approach is through the use of an external hard drive. We have taken many looks at complete externals and enclosures alike and these have proven to be a simple, fast way to back up your data. The drawbacks to this approach are the lack of disk redundancy as well as the convenience of taking off with the small enclosure. If mobility isn't a concern, and data redundancy is a must, a simple NAS box might be what you are looking. Earlier this year, we took a look at the Thecus N2100. Offering a slew of features and dual gigabit NICs, the RAID ready NAS fared well in our testing."