Monday, November 17, 2008

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

NAS is getting popular in office and at home, for they're small, convenient and probably suitable for small offices when they have no MIS person.

I got a chance to try out a model from Taiwan:



It features a 500MHz+ CPU with 256M memory. Obviously it's running Linux inside, you have so many features, and some of them are truely attractive.

The casing is made of metal. Installation of a SATA hard drive is simple and secure, the mounting is made with excellent fit and finish. The casing serves as a big heat sink and you can actually feel the warmth. It comes with a backup software and it works quite nice.

The performance is not great, but it's enough for normal users. If you have more than 10 active clients, I would recommend you to look for something else. Having said that, it's stable even under relatively high loading.

The bottomline is that, it's really convenient and powerful for a home user.