Lab

NAS appliances

Network Attached Storage appliances are hot property these days. No longer costing thousands of pounds and restricted to large enterprises, you can now put a 160GB NAS device on your network for just £96. With the spiralling popularity of disk-hungry media such as photos, music and videos, there's a need not only for extra storage, but storage that's readily accessible from multiple locations.

Sharing media is only one of the many reasons to consider investing in NAS. Most of the devices on test here will also allow you to connect USB printers and share them on your network, share files over the Internet via FTP and back up data to an additional disk for extra security.

It's possible to do all this without a NAS device - by sharing a disk and printer that are attached to a PC on the network - but this would require that computer to be powered on whenever another user wants access to those peripherals. With a NAS appliance, you can just plug it into your wireless router - or a normal router, switch or hub.

Not only will NAS save you money on your electricity bill, but it's far more convenient too. You can manage the device from anywhere on the network for sharing, access control and backup, as well as being able to share data across different operating systems - useful if you have Windows PCs and Macs on the network.

One disadvantage of some NAS devices is that they're limited to 100Mb/sec - considerably less than the transfer rates of the hard disks inside them. That's why we've included two dual-personality devices from LaCie and Freecom. These can either operate as a NAS device on a 10/100 network or be directly attached via USB 2 when performance is critical.

The nine appliances cover a wide price range and cater for simple and complex requirements, so read on to find out which NAS device best suits your setup.