I have been thinking of buying a NAS box to hold all my photos and videos because the Dell laptop is beginning to creak under the weight of all the files. Also, I have recently started importing and editing my Mini DV tapes so I need a lot of disk space. A NAS solution is very attractive to me because at the moment I have an external USB hard drive that I physically need to cart around to do my Ghost backups on my two machines. I was thinking of doing the video editing on my PC but although it has plenty of disk, it is just too elderly for the job (Athlon 1Ghz and 512mb ouch!).
My research has led me to this little beauty. The Synology DS106j. Not only is it a NAS device but it also has an embedded OS which enables it to be used as a media server, a web server and even more intriguingly, a BitTorrent client. No more leaving the power-hungry PC on overnight while downloading the latest episode of The Amazing Race ;-).
The unit comes without a hard drive, but I have a couple that I can experiment with. It is my intention to attach it to my router and then daisy chain my existing USB hard drive off the NAS. Hopefully performance won’t be too sluggish on my 54g wireless network.