Product Reviews

Network storage is a great way to make sure that all your files are available from any PC on your network. They are also generally cheaper than going to the hassle of having a dedicated home server. If you already have a hard disk, there's no need to buy a fully loaded network attached storage (NAS) device, as you can buy a kit and make your own. RaidSonic's Icy Box IB-NAS1000 kit will take a PATA hard disk. It unscrews easily and it shouldn't take you long to install a hard disk, although screwing the disk into its enclosure can be fiddly.

Once your hard disk has been installed, setting up the NAS1000 is easy. It just needs to be plugged into your network and turned on. If your PC has the UPnP service turned on then the NAS1000 will broadcast its presence and appear in My Network Places. Double-clicking its icon will take you to the web-configuration pages, which let you configure the storage and how it can be accessed.

The web interface is well thought-out, so you shouldn't have to turn to the manual too often. This is

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a good thing, because the manual is badly laid out and has been poorly translated so we found it difficult to understand.

Setting up different groups of users with differing levels of access to different folders and files is straightforward enough, as is enforcing storage quotas to stop users gobbling up all the storage space with too many files. These settings will work over your Windows network, so you can map network drives from your PCs.

If you want to have access to your storage from the internet, you can use the NAS1000's FTP server. You'll have to set up port forwarding (sometimes called virtual servers) on your router, though, and it's worth getting a free DynDNS.org account so that you don't have to get (and remember) a static internet IP address.

Unfortunately, the NAS1000 is very slow to access over a network and is especially slow at reading and writing small files. We were able to watch a DVD movie stored on the NAS1000 over our network without any dropped frames during fast-paced action scenes, but there were slight pauses when skipping backwards or forwards to a different chapter. The NAS1000 can also be used via USB, so you would be better off copying large numbers of files over USB before sharing them over a network.

As you can install only a single hard disk, you can't use RAID to protect your files, so we'd recommend making regular backups. If you already have a spare PATA hard disk and you need FTP access to your files, the IB-NAS1000 does the job. But if you don't need FTP, Netgear's SC101 is faster, can accommodate a second disk as part of a RAID array and costs £30 less.