If your looking for somewhere to store all of your favorite movies, music and video files then a network hard drive is what you need. There are lots of options on the market, below are our reviews of the best drives available.
| Iomega StorCenter-ix2-200 1TB |
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Easy file sharing, data backup and print serving from any networked Windows PC, Mac, or Linux workstation. Built tough and brings a huge amount of capabilities to cover all of networking functions |
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| LaCie Network Space 2 1TB |
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USB to external disk is very useful to do some backup you can backup files on Lacie to the external drive and vice versa. Small enough for a 1TB storage. It also comes with user-friendly software, LaCie Network Assistant, that can help you in your network. |
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So what is a Network Hard Drive?
The need for vast amounts of storage is becoming essential for the everyday home user or small business. There are various solutions you can choose to achieve this, whether it’s upgrading your internal hard drive, using a portable USB stick or plugging in a portable hard drive. However one of the most reliable solutions is to choose a network hard drive. These are more commonly known as a network attached storage devices or NAS for short. They have a standard Ethernet port and plug directly into a router or wireless router.
This allows any computer connected to that network, whether wired or wireless to access the drive, store files, share files, stream media and much more.
There are many advantages to using a network hard drive namely:
• Easy setup and connection directly into your existing router.
• Can be utilized by all of the computers and devices on your network.
• Easy file sharing between all computers on the network.
• Can stream movies and music directly through the network.
• Many drives are easily upgradable with USB ports or removable drives.
• Drives with USB ports can often be used as print servers to enable network printing.
• NAS drives often have their own processors and internal memory to fast data transfer.
• Many drives ship with some excellent backup software and user interfaces.
• Much more storage space than conventional USB drives.
These are just some of the advantages, and obviously each drive comes with their own specifications and features. We particularly like the Network Hard Drives that house 3.5” internal hard drives. The drives can easily be slotted out and replaced with a bigger drive to provide more storage so are great for a future proof solution.
Another great advantage is that the devices with multiply drives use raid. So for example if you have a NAS drive with 4 drives, 2 drives could be your drives that you use all of the time for storage and backup and the other 2 drives will constantly backup or ghost. Meaning that if the worst did happen and one of the drives failed, then you would always have a backup. This is why many business and home users with important files or indeed important movies collections choose a NAS drive.
Data transfer is fast and reliable, with gigabyte Ethernet ports transfers of gigabytes of data really doesn’t take that long. Have a look at the Network Hard Drive reviews above for further details of what’s available on the market.
> > Check out the full range of Network Hard Drives available
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