I recently had two sub three year old 120GB hard drives fail at home. This was a real pain for me so I researched some solutions that give me large network attached storage (NAS) with some redundancy and management features like backup etc. My solution was the Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV. This unit features:

• 4 lockable hot-swappable SATA disk trays
• RAID 0/1/5
• Programmable backup button
• One USB 2.0 port in front, two in back
• Server-rated power supply
• Low power consumption and silent operation
• Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo frame support
• print server

So far I have found this unit great. I am currently running it with 2x SAMSUNG 300GB drives which are currently good value for money. I will eventually, as I can afford it and need the storage, increase the number of drives to 4. I am running the NAS using a system called X-RAID which dynamically expands the volume and data onto new disks and migrates from RAID 0 to 1 to 5. You can even sequentially replace each disk with larger ones and the NAS will migrate over to the larger disks.

I looked into some DIY options but these all involved having old pc's lying around and no doubt a fair amount of my time I now don't have. A DIY NAS solution is cheaper in terms of hardware cost, but this appliance solution is really small (think toaster size) and requires little setup time and gives you the confidence that comes with a well designed and tested product like this.

As broadband, home media servers, video editing/storage and hard drive failures become more common, I see the home NAS market picking up in the next year.

- Gabe