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This article was written by Don VanSyckel, the club president, as a part of "The President's Pen". This article appeared in the January 2009 WYSIWYG newsletter. What's a NAS (Network Attached Storage)? by Don VanSyckel Have you heard of a "NAS"? Do you know what it is? A NAS is a Network Attached Storage unit. Yeah, so? Storage as in disk storage. When it come right down to it, from one point of view a NAS is very similar to an external USB drive. It's disk drive storage for your PC that's external to the PC and has it's own power supply. From another point of view it's very different from an external USB drive. An external USB drive is connected to one computer by a USB port. There are four significant differences:
A NAS is a small simple file server in a box as an appliance. This means that there is some set up but the setup is minimal and easy. Hopefully you've all set up your home network router. It's no harder than that. Most NAS give you a choice of Windows style file share or Linux style file sharing. Then you make a user accounts for you and anyone else you want to have access to the NAS. You can choose to share data between users, keep it private, or some of each. Most NAS I have seen come with one disk drive and can have a second one added. Some NAS can do disk RAID protect. RAID is a technique that offers real time data duplication on disk and depending on the RAID 'level' also offers improved disk through put. The down side is some storage is lost; generally on disk's worth However, with disk drive prices still falling this shouldn't be a problem if you need data integrity. Currently NASs are a bit more than external USB disk drives but the price will narrow and the feature set is quite a bit more. The other feature I expect to see is the number of disk drives which today is generally two, should grow to 4 or 6. End of Article |
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